SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has reiterated plans for Starship to take over Starlink launches, eventually fully replacing Falcon 9’s role in the constellation.
Since dedicated Starlink launches began in May 2019, Musk, COO and President Gwynne Shotwell, and a few other SpaceX officials and executives have made it clear that the company would ultimately transition the task of launching and maintaining the Starlink constellation from Falcon 9 to Starship. Barring major surprises, Starship is being designed to be fully and rapidly reusable from the ground up, nominally making the system far cheaper to launch.
After Musk announced a radical redesign that replaced carbon composite structures with simple steel, Starship may even be far cheaper to build than Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy – despite being several times larger, heavier, more powerful, and more capable. Despite its relative shortcomings, though, Falcon 9 has become an extraordinarily reliable and available workhorse for SpaceX and has completed 28 operational Starlink launches – delivering ~1670 satellites to orbit – since November 2019.
However, while Falcon 9 has done and continues to do an extraordinary job of routinely launching satellites and astronauts, Starship promises to blow it out of the water. It might be several years before Starship is deemed safe and reliable enough to launch humans but SpaceX could feasibly start launching Starlink satellites on the rocket almost as soon as it begins orbital flight tests.
Thanks to the low cost of each Starlink satellite, likely now around ~$250,000, it would be surprising if SpaceX didn’t include at least a few dozen satellites in the early phases of orbital Starship flight tests – even if success is far from guaranteed. At some point, though, and perhaps quite quickly, Starship will safely make it to orbit, reenter, and touch down beside a Super Heavy booster a few times in a row, effectively demonstrating fitness to launch (uncrewed) payloads.
It could take a bit more proof to convince paying customers with satellites worth tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to entrust launch contracts to Starship but SpaceX itself – likely to be the builder and owner of the world’s largest satellite constellation for the indefinite future – has more flexibility to tailor its appetite for caution. With the capabilities Starship could feasibly offer, SpaceX might also be hard-pressed to just sit and wait.
Speaking at a conference in October 2019, Gwynne Shotwell revealed that a single Starship would be able to launch up to 400 Starlink satellites (~106,000 kg/230,000 lb) at a time – equivalent to more than six and a half dedicated Falcon 9 missions. Unofficial renders imagining the payload have made it clear that more than 300 satellites could fit inside Starship’s truly cavernous fairing with ease.
Simply put, even if early Starship launches somehow end up being five times more costly than a partially expendable Falcon 9 (i.e. >$75M), the per-satellite launch cost of Starlink missions would be no worse than Falcon while simultaneously delivering several times more satellites to orbit. In reality, unless SpaceX has to expend an entire ship, booster, and ~35 Raptor engines, the total cost of a Starship launch could already be cheaper than Falcon 9 even before factoring in the cost per Starlink satellite.
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Even with a downright tranquil monthly launch cadence, a year of 300-satellite Starlink mission on Starship would more than double what Falcon 9 has managed with 28 launches in the last ~20 months. SpaceX is unlikely to be ready to support truly operational Starship Starlink launches or risk ~$75-100 million of satellites until sometime next year but it’s safe to say that the wait will be worth it.
Elon Musk
The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space
Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.
Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.
The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.
AI agentic Internet traffic will obviously VASTLY exceed human usage. Not a close call at all.
Cloudflare’s forecast is accurate. https://t.co/VztgrinN5k pic.twitter.com/Wo4FiRKjPU
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 9, 2026
The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.
By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.
SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.
None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.
Elon Musk
The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.
The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.
Introducing Liner Truck 3 — our latest fully electric tunnel vehicle.
– Tesla Model 3 battery and drive units
– Transports 22,000+ lb of concrete segments to the boring machine
– 28 miles of range
– 12 mph max operating speed
– Remotely piloted from Global OCC in Texas, with… pic.twitter.com/XB7FgSXnpy— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) August 7, 2026
The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.
The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.
The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.
It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.
SpaceX stock did the opposite of what most of Wall Street expected this week, when the day designed to be its most dangerous turned into a rally, and the rally kept going.
Thursday marked the first major lockup expiration since SpaceX’s June IPO, making roughly 911.5 million insider held shares eligible to trade for the first time, more than doubling the company’s public float. Analysts and short sellers had spent weeks bracing for a flood of selling, especially after the stock fell 13 percent following its first earnings report as a public company on Tuesday. Instead, shares rose 6.1 percent Thursday to close at $114.92, and by Friday they were trading near $129, up more than another 12 percent on the day.
SpaceX shorts get warned by Musk ally, echoing Tesla’s early struggles
The setup made the outcome notable. Short interest had climbed to roughly 34 percent of the float heading into earnings, among the highest of any large cap stock, with about 95 percent of available shares to borrow already on loan. CEO Elon Musk warned short sellers twice in the weeks before the lockup, writing on X that “the survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low,” then following up on the morning of earnings with “I try to warn them, but they just double down.”
When the newly unlocked shares hit the market and the selloff never showed up, some of that short position appears to have started unwinding. TipRanks reported that options activity shifted toward bullish strategies like put selling and risk reversals following the rally, with roughly $600 million in options premium trading Thursday alone. Retail buyers also stepped in during the earnings dip, according to Vanda Research.
The fundamentals behind the stock have not changed much in a week. SpaceX’s revenue nearly doubled year over year to $7.8 billion, with Starlink subscribers doubling to 12 million and the company’s AI segment growing 247 percent. What spooked investors on Tuesday was the spending side. Capital expenditures jumped to more than $18 billion for the quarter, up from $2.8 billion a year earlier, with AI investment alone rising from $749 million to $15.8 billion. Wall Street remains split on whether that spending is building infrastructure SpaceX needs or outrunning what the business can currently support, a debate Teslarati has tracked since shares first came under pressure.
None of that resolves the bigger question hanging over the stock. Thursday’s release was only the first of nine staggered lockup tranches, with roughly $800 billion worth of additional shares scheduled to become eligible through October, and Musk’s own stake stays locked until next June. If this week is any indication, the market is treating that supply as something it can absorb rather than something to fear, at least for now.
The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space
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