I don’t understand what you are saying. Every additional starlink user added incurs additional costs to starlink.
But I do believe the true cost of Ukrainian users is a tiny fraction compared to the overall investment.
Maybe a solution to all of this would be for starlink to charge the US just for the actual cost of the connection and none of the infrastructure. The US is already paying 54 billion for bullets and food and meds to ukraine, they could easily carve a few bucks for the internet.
If you can’t trust that your communication system hasn’t been compromised by the enemy, that makes it kind of useless, though.
He’s great at finding ways to insert himself to fuck things up, though. Especially out of spite…
Yeah, I’m kind of assuming - perhaps naively - they were already doing that. I’m wondering if there’s unmaskable basic (meta) data, though (e.g. location information for terminals) that could be used maliciously against Ukraine.
Pretty surprised by how much newer VPNs are actually better, wireguard is so much faster to use when you know how it runs, tunnel SSH over that and you’ve got enough cover to keep your comms safe well beyond their expire by date…
First of all, he’s selling to them an expensive car, so they can both show they’re filthy rich to the plebs and they’re “green”.
Having, say a BMW, or a Mercedes doesn’t show clearly both these things, because their electric models looks linke petrol cars, and Mercedes makes also the electric Vito that is and looks a “soccer mom” or “plumber” minivan, because it is.
From the article: "Musk wrote last week that “only a small percentage” of Starlink terminals and service were paid for by outside sources and that the “operation has cost SpaceX $80M & will exceed $100M by end of year.”
As others have said, I’m sure Pedo Guy is quoting retail prices and not the actual cost of providing Starlink services, but okay, let’s go with that. And let’s say Pedo Guy is paying the whole shot out of his own pocket (he isn’t).
Pedo Guy’s personal wealth is about 200 billion dollars. Let’s say he has it conservatively invested in a high-interest savings account at 2% interest (he doesn’t). That will return him just under $11 million per day. I think he can afford a little altruism, but he may look at it differently.
No, it is not.
That is just an extrapolation of the recent sale price of a small fraction of shares the company has, and it doesn’t really reflect the amount he can get if he tries to sell them all, or even a good part of it, because as soon as he try or do the sale of a part, the price will drop.
It is also not possible to estimate the yearly/monthly return they might have, because his companies have an unrealistic ratio of profit per share price (i can’t remember the correct technical term).
IIRC, there was a discussion about that lazy kind of report on people’s wealth here on BBS some time ago with more details.
ETA:
That money would come out of starlink account, not his.
And, it has been shown that he has a liquidity problem when he had to exercise his rights to tesla’s shares options and pay the tax on the gains, so he personally cannot pay for it.
It does not mean that he is not still filthily rich (as no one person should be), but he is not as rich as he wants to be seen.
I think even here, Tesla is going to be in electric cars what Osbourne was for portable computers. I live in Munich, which is admittedly BMW’s home town, but Teslas are now getting outnumbered by electric Beemers, Audis, Fiats and Renaults. The Fiat 500e is especially popular, using the same looks as the combustible engine version, but that’s just a testament to how the retro design works.
Tesla is making the same mistake that Osbourne made, with the Cybertruck being the vaporware the Osbourne 2 was, but more importantly it’s not really improving any, whilst the established players are flexing their car building prowess and generations of experience in chassis building, wiring, even in dashboard UI.
There’s a critical mass building up around Elon, and I can smell the stress coming off of him. I have a premonition of Tesla eventually being bought out by Stellantis or Daimler, and the US government eventually stepping in to buy SpaceX in the interest of national security. And in a few decades, maybe they will make a movie about Elon’s rise and fall.
He’ll end up tweeting from an undisclosed bunker somewhere in New Zealand. The last human left on Twitter. Buried under millions and millions of bots. Bots that are rudimentary self-aware by then and use his tweets for fun in a game that is basically a reversed Turing test.