These talks came after America’s three biggest wireless companies—Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile—all rebuffed SpaceX’s proposal, The Washington Post reported Monday (Nov. 2), citing sources familiar with the matter.
Musk met last month with Charlie Ergen, chairman of Boost owner EchoStar, sources said. A potential deal could lead to SpaceX acquiring Boost Mobile or SpaceX obtaining access to its network, which it leases from AT&T and T-Mobile US, the sources added.
The Post characterized the idea of SpaceX gaining access to those lease agreements as a “coup” for the company, letting Musk make a play for a $235 billion U.S. wireless market. However, sources told the news outlet that the proposed service may need consent from those carriers to get off the ground.
While SpaceX has built its reputation on its rocket and satellite projects, Musk has described his dream of transforming it into a mega-company offering a range of of services. The world’s richest person has estimated the company’s revenue dreams could reach $1 trillion per year as soon as 2027, leading to a valuation Musk has said could ultimately surpass the world economy.
“Veterans of the cellular industry look at the chess board of existing pieces and don’t see a solution,” Musk said recently. “They don’t understand that SpaceX is developing entirely new pieces that fundamentally alter the strategic landscape.”
SpaceX announced in June that it would spend $60 billion to acquire AI coding startup Cursor to help its xAI unit develop “the world’s most useful AI models.”
“The merger gave SpaceX the computing infrastructure but not the product,” PYMNTS wrote at the time. “Cursor supplied what xAI couldn’t: a widely adopted AI coding tool with a large base of professional software engineers already paying for it.”
In other SpaceX news, the company last month debuted a partner program that provides training, tools and support to companies that develop products, solutions and services with the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) model, Grok.
The company’s SpaceX Super Intelligence Partner Network is open to “transformation partners” that help businesses use the Grok platform and to “marketplace partners” that create plugins and integrations that link Grok to other tools, SpaceX said in a news release.
