Will SpaceX become the world’s biggest telecoms provider? Probably.
By launching 11,943 satellites SpaceX will do to telecoms what WhatsApp/Facebook Messenger did to SMS and in doing so capture a $1tn+ business — and there’s fringe benefits for Tesla.
(This is a followup post to three earlier posts on forecasting. The first in May 2015 forecast both blimp-based and dedicated building-based drone deployments (later patented by Amazon); The second in October 2015 largely predicted Elon Musk’s Tesla Masterplan Part Deux by 9 months, the third in July 2016 among other things correctly hypothesised the use of Model X falcon wings for future possible Tesla bus designs. I try to get it right but I mainly enjoy the idle speculation).
NOTE: I have followed up this blog post with a yet more detailed product analysis here.
I was recently in San Francisco and had a very random number of drinks with two very friendly employees of US telco AT&T. As is often the case I turned the conversation towards autonomous vehicles, and more specifically two of Elon Musk’s companies, Tesla and SpaceX.
I was curious about how cars, such as a Model S, have much greater data connectivity needs than ever before. Right now, Teslas…
