The Starlink business alone is worth roughly a trillion dollars, generating ~$40B of revenue with ~$30B in free cash flow within a year, which would fund all of the rest of Musk's ventures as upside.
David Sacks builds a bull case for SpaceX by isolating the Starlink segment: 12M subscribers (doubled YoY), $2.6B adjusted EBIT that quarter, ~$66 ARPU, and scaling enterprise deals. He projects it to be a ~$1T standalone business within 18 months that self-funds Starship, AI compute, and Terapab. ✦ AI generated
David Sacks · All-In Podcast · 2026-08-08 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 27:00
“Saxs your take on these spectacular I guess is the only way to describe them results coming from a vertical that wasn't part of SpaceX's business but nine months ago.”
I think Starlink's just an unbelievable juggernaut cash machine. On the connectivity side... they generated $2.6 billion in adjusted EBA... 4.3 billion in the quarter and 2.6 billion in adjusted EBIT. He's got 12 million subscribers. That's doubled year-over-year. $66 arpoo per month... he grew 20% quarter over quarter. So if you extrapolate this out... Starlink alone could be generating on the order of $40 billion of revenue topline with a huge amount of that flowing to free cash. That could be a $30 billion free cash flow within the year. That alone provides the cash flow to fund much of what Elon's doing. And if you just put a 30x multiple on that... I think you could probably get a 30x just on the Starlink business. The Starlink business alone could be a trillion dollar market cap within 2 years, within 18 months, let's say. That I think funds all of the rest of this as kind of science projects and upside.
verbatim transcript · starts at 27:00
26:45they generated $2.6 billion in adjusted EBA. You can kind of approximate that to be kind of operating cash flow. Space was kind of, you know, negative 200 million. So call it break even and AI was plus 1.1 billion. But AI, to Brad's point, it's unclear whether the pricing they're getting on compute rental today is temporary and at a premium because of the lack of compute available in the
27:12market today. And people that need comput are paying Elon a premium for that comput. So I think there's a question mark where that goes. But the connectivity piece on Starlink, 4.3 billion in the quarter and 2.6 billion in adjusted EBIT. He's got 12 million subscribers. That's doubled year-over-year. $66 arpoo per month uh what people are paying per month. And he grew 20% quarter over quarter. So if you
27:38extrapolate this out, he's pretty close to being at a 24 million subscriber run rate on this multiple. Assuming this enterprise stuff which is like airlines and other things scale which they seem to be scaling with the consumer business, Starlink alone could be generating on the order of $40 billion of revenue topline with a huge amount of that flowing to free cash. That could be a $30 billion free cash flow within the
28:05year. That alone provides the cash flow to fund much of what what Elon's doing. And if you just put a 30x multiple on that, which I think you can because these subscription businesses are very high renewal rate, very low capac, I think you could probably get a 30x just on the Starlink business. The Starlink business alone could be a trillion dollar market cap within 2 years, within
28:2718 months, let's say. That I think funds all of the rest of this as kind of science projects and upside. So, I'm kind of making a bull case. It's crazy to me how well the Starlink business performs and you can see it in AT&T and Verizon, Huenet, Viaat. I mean, these companies have been decimated. I used to have a Huenet satellite dish on my Sonoma County ranch in order to get
28:48internet. That's what we had to use. It was like, you know, 200 bucks a month or something orbit, right? And they take forever to >> terrible service. And that market got decimated by Starlink. And if he launches the handset thing, that subscriber growth is going to go right now. He's adding 2 million subscribers on the consumer side a quarter. You could see that going to four to 5
29:09million a quarter. You could actually see an acceleration in the consumer million mobile sub 400 million mobile subs just in the United States. >> I think you can make you can make the bull case on Starlink alone and then the rest of it is like, hey, is Elon going to do well with investing the excess capital that's spitting off of Starlink? How's Elon going to do with that money?