It's profitable if you pay for the rockets. Starlink is a massive business now and it keeps getting larger, and it has good margins. It can trivially pay for the rocket business over time.
... if it pays for the launches, it has negative margins. I'm not sure what's hard to understand here.
It might be the case that once you get enough satellites up and replace them consistently enough that margins go positive, and then you can start paying back the cost of "the rocket business" (i.e. more than the marginal cost of launch) but... it's not at all clear that's even theoretically possible. At least not without launch costs coming down significantly from where they are today, which Starship is not clearly en route to achieving.
I expected that to be true - that Starlink would not be profitable pre-Starship. But Starlink revenue has exceeded expectations.
By now, Starlink is profitable even if launched with Falcon 9 - and Starship is coming online.
Unless I’m misunderstanding something OP is saying that the only reason Starlink is profitable is because they don’t pay for the rocket launches. But the rocket launches still cost money, it’s just that SpaceX pays for it. But given they’re part of the same overall organization it just seems like an accounting trick.
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