Key Takeaways
- Elon Musk said Delta “will lose a lot of customers” after a post noted that United has Starlink on more than 600 planes, about 36% of its fleet, and Delta has none.
- In-flight Starlink is becoming a competitive weapon between airlines, and that gives SpaceX leverage to sign up the rest of the industry.
- SpaceX just made contact with its first V3 Starlink satellites, and one Starship load carries about as much network capacity as 20 Falcon 9 launches, according to SpaceX watcher Nic Cruz Patane.
- The main risk is that there’s no booking data yet showing travellers choose airlines based on Wi-Fi.
SpaceX (SPCX) just got a pitch for Starlink that no ad agency could have written.
It came on Monday from author and former banker John LeFevre, in a post on X:
“United has 600+ planes with Starlink (~36% of the fleet), rising to 100% by the end of 2027.
Delta has zero, and no plans for it.
People will book accordingly.
RIP Delta.”
Elon Musk piled on: “Delta will lose a lot of customers.”
Subtle and diplomatic, as always.
Why an airline should care
The issue here is that United Airlines (UAL) and Delta Air Lines (DAL) compete head to head on plenty of routes.
Anyone who’s paid for in-flight Wi-Fi and stared at a spinning wheel for an hour knows why this matters. If one airline’s internet works the way it does at home, that’s a big advantage.
Think about the consultant who needs to be on a video call during the 7 a.m. flight to Chicago. The parents with two kids and five hours to fill on the way to Orlando. The fan who doesn’t want to miss the fourth quarter at 35,000 feet.
If those two flights cost about the same, which one would you book?
That’s where SpaceX’s leverage comes from. Once one big carrier commits its whole fleet, every rival is on the clock: sign up, or hand United a talking point on every route where they compete.
The capacity is showing up right on time
All of this depends on SpaceX having enough bandwidth to go around.
This week, SpaceX made contact with its first V3 Starlink satellites after Starship’s orbital launch. (We covered the launch itself here.)
As Rob Maurer put it: “With today’s single Starship launch, SpaceX added more Starlink capacity in the last hour than the first ~1.5 years of Starlink launches. The next launch will cover another full year.”
Why does that matter for airlines? A plane is a couple hundred people in a metal tube, moving at hundreds of miles an hour, all trying to get online at once. Serving that takes a lot of capacity overhead, and SpaceX just got a much faster way to add it.
It could matter for the business too. If one Starship launch adds the capacity of about 20 Falcon 9 launches, the cost of each unit of capacity should come down over time. So gross margin is the figure I’d watch…
Of course, the business is more than “just” Starlink (SpaceX splits into “Space”, “Connectivity”, and “AI”), so gross margin will also depend on contribution from all the other businesses folded into SpaceX.
Isn’t this…a rounding error?
For now, yes. And I haven’t seen any booking data showing travellers switch airlines over it.
But the fees are the smaller part of the prize.
Every United flight with Starlink is a demo for a planeful of people, many of whom have never thought about putting a dish on their roof. Every airline that follows adds more demos, and more pressure on the airlines still holding out.
And while it’s not the sole driver of projected growth from here, it’s certainly a major one.
So will Delta lose a lot of customers?
Plenty of anecdata out there on X, but I’m not convinced this will matter to the vast majority of people. I could be wrong! Historically, betting against Musk hasn’t been a great call.
But I’ve had plenty of “good enough” wifi on flights without using Starlink, and I have a suspicion that’ll be how most folks feel.
We’ll see. It’s early.
So what is SpaceX stock actually worth?
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