Elon Musk used a recent SpaceX town hall, posted to the company’s X profile, to reset expectations for what Starlink is actually trying to become. His framing is transformational: “Almost 11,000 satellites in orbit. That’s almost twice as many satellites as everyone else combined. And with Starlink V3 and beyond, we’ll go to 100,000 satellites,” Musk said. He added that Starlink “might end up doing over 90% of all Internet traffic” and described the effort as rebuilding “the entire Internet in space.”
The 100,000 Number in Context
The scale gap between Starlink and public satellite competitors is now enormous. AST SpaceMobile (NASDAQ:ASTS), the closest publicly traded direct-to-device rival, has 13 spacecraft in orbit and is targeting approximately 45 satellites by early 2027. CEO Abel Avellan told analysts on the Q2 call that AST’s approach is deliberately different: “We are building the direct-to-device (D2D) network of the future today in partnership with, not in competition with, mobile network operators.”
AST reported $31.52 million in Q2 revenue and a $125.9 million loss tied to the BB7 launch incident. Shares are up roughly 50% over the past year but only 2% YTD.
Legacy operator Viasat (NASDAQ:VSAT) is being squeezed on the other end. CEO Mark Dankberg told investors “the combination of growth in the space market, and our business and technical progress is creating more opportunity for us than ever.” Yet fixed broadband services fell 27% year over year last quarter, even as the stock has run sharply year to date on defense backlog strength.
The Wireless Wedge
Musk’s Tesla earnings comments framing Starlink as a competitor to AT&T (NYSE:T) and Verizon (NYSE:VZ) land differently now. Both carriers are betting on AST SpaceMobile for their satellite-to-cell answer. AT&T CEO John Stankey argued “network performance and operating scale can’t be matched” with fiber locations at 38.6 million. Verizon CEO Dan Schulman is leaning on AI: “with the emergence of AI infrastructure revenue, we are fundamentally reshaping Verizon’s growth trajectory.” VZ stock is up 15.3% YTD while AT&T is down 2.4% over the same period.
T-Mobile US (NASDAQ:TMUS) took the opposite side, embedding Starlink directly into its consumer offer. CEO Srini Gopalan told investors “we see a tremendous runway for growth across both wireless and broadband, as well as new businesses. We’re just getting started.” Q2 postpaid service revenue rose 12.6% to $15.85 billion. The stock is down 12.8% YTD.
What Wall Street Is Pricing
SemiAnalysis projects that one gigawatt of SpaceX inference capacity could generate about $31 billion to $48 billion in annualized revenue under its Anthropic and Google deals. For comparison, AST reaffirmed 2026 revenue of $150 million to $200 million with a revenue backlog around $1.3 billion. If Musk delivers even a fraction of the 100,000-satellite plan, the addressable pie shifts fast, and the public tickers investors can actually own to play it remain a very short list.
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