The FCC revoked that award before the money was handed over because starlink wasn’t meeting the speeds they needed to meet for the deadline 3 years in the future and they didn’t think they would make it. The speeds that money was supposed to help them achieve launching the satellites required to meet it.

No one else had that made up requirement put on them in advance.

The goal that was 3 years in the future, which would have been around now or early 2026, required them to meet their speed (100d + 20u) and latency (<100ms) goals for 40% of the 650k rural users.

They had 1.5 million US customers at the start of 2025, not sure how many are part of this rural 650k but id imagine the majority are, and only 260k of the rural ones have to meet the requirements.

Ookla did a post about starlink in Maine where it shows many of the users are meeting those requirements

https://www.ookla.com/articles/above-maine-starlink-twinkles

Median DL: 116.77 (over the required 100)

Media UL: 18.17 (just shy of the required 20)

90th Percentile DL: 250.96

90th Percentile UL 27.17

If Maine is a representative example, then they are probably meeting their 40% target of 260k rural users despite not getting the money which would have accelerated things and made launches more focused on meeting the goals.

Edit: extra details.

Exec: Hey Claude, are we killing people?

ClaudeAI: Yes.

Exec: Are you sure? I think were doing great things for them, i don’t see it as killing

ClaudeAI: Of course you aren’t, you’re doing great things!

You don’t believe the MSM stretches or bends the truth? I got a bridge to sell ya!

Reuters story for example

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-musk-steering-suspension/

Tesla’s response

https://www.tesla.com/en_ca/blog/addressing-misleading-claims

Is there some truth to what Reuters says? No doubt.

Is there some truth to what Tesla responded with? Very likely.

Stories get twisted to have just enough truth to get whatever their agenda is across.

Why doesn’t Musk sue them if they are lying?

Under the assumption that it’s not a lie, there’s probably sensitive information that would come out in discovery that they’d rather not reveal, and there’s enough truth to it that they might not win, such as with my example in the previous reply.

why bring up the cybercab or whatever

I bring it up because it’s the same new manufacturing process as the 25k car. It’s a wholly new way to manufacture cars. All future cars from Tesla are going to use this new process if it works and its intention is to dramatically reduce the cost of the vehicle. If this process does not work, there is no 25k car. It’s legitimately dead. If the process works, any future car from Tesla is going to use it, and the 25k car they had planned would quite possibly be the next vehicle produced with it. Ironing out the hiccups in the robotaxi, will impact what happens with the 25k car if it is truly not cancelled, (edit: and thus if it’s not cancelled, they will be keeping it in mind while working on the cybercab)

Did Musk not lie about “deal accomplished”.

Factually speaking, it was considered not true, but he also didn’t fight it as they were threatening the existence of the company at a very difficult time so he settled with the SEC.

This story happened a few days ago

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdxvr3n7wlxo

To which Elon responded “No deal has been signed” - https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1927839555828220165

Is the CEO of telegram going to somehow get in trouble now? Obviously neither xAi or Telegram are public companies, but this is pretty much what happened with Elon’s tweet, if there’s any shred of truth to what Elon has said.

Edit: And I’m not excusing that Elon tweeted funding secured, it was inappropriate, but he just claims to have done what the Telegram CEO did but under more serious circumstances.

Edit: Later edit in case you see this later… but here’s a video where Franz the lead designer responds to the claims https://x.com/BLKMDL3/status/1777029442935964066. “stay tuned, don’t always believe in what you read”

You can think all you want, and you might be right, but to prove a fraud case, you’re going to need proof.

Not my gut tells me, not anonymous sources say, or billionaires suck so it must be true. Proof. Proof is hard.

For all we know what Reuters saw was an email saying we’re canceling the 2026 launch of the 25k model to focus on the shared line models, we’ll come back to it in a few years after we learn more from the robotaxi development process.

We’ll never know because they are withholding the email they saw.

Reuters wanting clicks writes a headline truthful enough to not get them in legal trouble or have to write a retraction. This kind of stuff in the MSM is par for the course. They aren’t super trustworthy either.

Edit: also if Reuters is confident in their report and has the proof, why not sue Musk for Libel? Maybe it’s not as definitive as they wrote?

The roadster was announced in 2017, it’s been roughly 8 years since it was announced. They are still working on it, Lars has even said he has something like a weekly meeting about it.

Is that cancelled? No. Is it acceptable for the people who made deposits? Not really.

The 25k model is using their new “unboxed” method, which the Cybercab is also using. They clearly decided to go with the Cybercab first and that’s not up for debate, but they are still designing how the unboxed method even works. As they work on the Cybercab and hone the design of unboxed, if they are continually considering how that may impact the 25k vehicle they had originally planned to make in 2026, is that cancelled?

It’s not as black and white as you want it to be.

Edit:

What Reuters said was very definitive.

April 5 (Reuters) - Tesla has canceled the long-promised inexpensive car that investors have been counting on to drive its growth into a mass-market automaker, according to three sources familiar with the matter and company messages seen by Reuters.

If they still plan to build a cheaper consumer vehicle using the newer unboxed method and they simply back burnered it a few years in favor of the shared line models then it’s not canceled. Canceled (edit or killed) is very specific. There will be no 25k vehicle using the new method they had planned.

Edit: you would need to prove it’s actually canceled and that would be difficult. There’s a lot of other less definitive language Reuters could have used that would have made what Elon responded with definitely a lie.

Edit: just an example, the 2026 launch of the 25k vehicle was canceled/ killed. That is true. Refuting that is a lie. The 25k vehicle was canceled, is unclear, although this report further substantites it.

If it’s true, it’s not.

But you’d have to prove it.

Also lots of wiggle room on canceled vs delayed a long time.

Musk: punch me

X: OKAY

Musk: guess that wasn’t a great idea…

Not all states use private prisons, and I don’t think all state prisons participate in forced labor (although they may all have ‘optional’ programs)

The optional ones probably vary from truly optional, to we say it’s optional but you’ll be reprimanded somehow if you don’t.

Edit: this random post says 3/4 are forced via threat

https://freedomnetworkusa.org/2023/08/11/forced-labor-in-prisons/

I wish there was more municipal fiber. It’s absolutely insane that the big ISPs fight it and often win.

It depends on the distance, but yes. Those laser interlinks are fast.

The problem with fiber is it isn’t direct, and the satellites do use lasers (light!) to travel longer distances. The longer the distance the bigger edge satellite internet gets.

They deorbit every 5 years and burn up in the atmosphere they don’t make it to land (although i think i remember a a part of a very early version did and changes were made because it did, but that might have been something else)

There have been a couple launches where some solar radiation caused damage or a problem with the stage 2 and they all came down and burned up before they made their planned orbit. On occasion, there may be a faulty satellite that doesn’t reach its proper orbit after launch and instead comes down instead.

Short of an error during launches, it’s all planned.

They weren’t just paid, they were paid repeatedly and they repeatedly didn’t do it.

Starlink can be more direct as well. The further fiber goes the less direct it is. By the time we’re talking between continents that builds up a lot.

deleted by creator

Someone told me they are public some months ago? Like if someone wanted to look up your lemmy DMs they could.

I read the headline expecting to need some ELI5 on how they had some crazy optimizations… but guess it’s nothing like that hahaha.

Gwynne Shotwell (in case you don’t trust Elon) has stated that Starlink is profitable, and Elon has said it as well

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUAunM6abeY (Shotwell video)

From a profitability standpoint, it doesn’t matter if they have to keep re-launching satellites every 5 years, as long as the business with launching satellites is profitable. If they spend 5 billion doing launches every year and then after all their costs have any profit they can just keep spending 5 billion every year to replenish the network and keep making whatever that profit is.

Their profit gets capped by the amount of bandwidth and customers they can find, but it is predictable as they know their bandwidth and how many customers they can support per launch. By the time they are replenishing the network, if it was simply the same satellites and launch count their growth would begin to plateau, however every 5 years they can upgrade the satellites to the latest tech, so each 5 year cycle they’re actually able to increase their service capacity which means more customers and more profit. There’s already a big difference in capacity between their v1 and current satellites in orbit in terms of overall bandwidth per launch, and SpaceX keeps increasing their launch cadence.

Further, if Starship is successful, they’ll start offering gigabit services to consumers, and their costs would be dramatically reduced as now they have a reusable 1st AND 2nd stage. Starlink is already profitable with a disposable 2nd stage.

Just trying to compare it to fiber+5g completely misses the point that these LEO networks can provide internet to other things as well. Planes, boats, military, government services, remote areas fiber and 5g will never go, like a remote base in Antarctica. In critical setups people even use it as backup internet in fiber connected areas. All of that extra stuff is what helps make it profitable. It probably wouldn’t be profitable if it was simply servicing rural communities.

You are right that the upkeep of a fiber+5g system is less, but it costs millions of dollars to support a very small amount of people, so it takes a very long time to recoup that cost, but once the cost is covered, then the profits start rolling in for a very very long time. The problem is the big telco’s would rather spend less money to connect more people in urban areas and recoup that cost faster. (edit: On the other hand Starlink has to be able to recoup that cost (and more) in 5 years or the business simply doesn’t work)

Starlink isn’t meant to compete with this kind of service if it’s installed, but the Teclos don’t want to install it due to the high upfront costs and very long pay back time.

Edit: Just to be clear, they still have to make back the cost of the original network when they weren’t profitable, but as long as they are profitable in its current state, they’ll get there. While we don’t know the exact cost for the existing network, it’s probably around $8 billion dollars as we have rough ideas of launch costs + dish costs. In 2025 they’re going to make over 10 billion in revenue. They haven’t publicly disclosed how much of that will be profit.

Those satellites cover the entire orbit. They can offer service to multiple countries for consumers and then provide commercial services for airplanes and marine craft. It makes up for the cost, and I imagine the commercial side is actually a big part of how they’ve become profitable.

Spending millions to build fiber/5g infrastructure to support a hundred or so people just isn’t as appealing, which is why no one wants to do it.