Wow, that de-escalated quickly …

Back on June 3, SpaceX was poised to disrupt the $1.6 trillion U.S. telecom industry, and operators including AT&T were at risk, warned Oppenheimer, just nine days before SpaceX pulled off the largest IPO in history.

On June 25, SPCX had ebbed a bit from its record-breaking debut of $161 a share, and subsequent rise to more than $201 a share, trading at around $153. Still, TD Cowen analyst Gregory Williams wondered if Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite company, which runs Direct-to-Device (D2D) satellite broadband service Starlink, might just go and buy T-Mobile, market capped at just under $190 billion.

On the same day, the Financial Times reported that SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell had told investors that the company was aiming to build or acquire its own terrestrial wireless network, essential to expanding its D2D satellite business into denser urban and suburban markets, where it would compete head-on with AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon.

Shares for all three incumbent wireless companies declined around 9% over the next few trading days, with Barron’s noting how the “SpaceX threat” had “wiped out $46 billion of market value from the Big 3 telecoms.”

The pub’s headline added, “and the pain might not be over!”

Actually, it was.

Jump to last Thursday, July 24: With about $1.1 billion of SPCX market capitalization just … gone … and SpaceX trading at $118.24 a share, T-Mobile President and CEO Srini Gopalan declared D2D service provided by SpaceX and its Starlink subsidiary merely a “complementary” component of T-Mobile’s service portfolio.

In fact, T-Mobile’s D2D partnership with Starlink accounted for only around 0.0003% of the carrier’s network usage.

It was earnings week for the major U.S. wireless mucky-mucks, and all of them seemed to make a point, masked with subtlety — they remain unbothered by a potential competitor that lost $4.95 billion last year.

Repeatedly asked about SpaceX during Verizon’s Q2 call on Friday, CEO Dan Schulman also used the word “complimentary” to describe D2D service. He only referred to the broader D2D sector, never mentioning Musk, SpaceX or Starlink by name.

The Big 3 remained in lock step — none of them would agree to lease network resources to SpaceX via an MVNO arrangement.

As for the notion of SpaceX working with Charter — which does have an MVNO agreement to use Verizon’s network — Schulman said Verizon will provide no backdoor for SpaceX.

“There is no reason that we can see to extend an MVNO to any satellite player, and there's no way that anyone can get access to our MVNOs, as well,” Schulman said.

Several days earlier, AT&T CEO John Stankey also declared his intention to maintain the Big 3’s united front — Elon Musk and Starlink still aren’t getting lease access to AT&T’s network, Stankey said. And building their own network won’t be cheap or easy.

“They have to catch up with substantial amounts of infrastructure investment that’s been going on for decades inside hospitals, on university campuses, in stadiums, in tall buildings,” said Stankey, amid a rally for his stock.

Last month, Bloomberg reported that SpaceX had spoken with Charter Communications. Beyond the MVNO lease arrangement with Verizon that SpaceX can’t touch, the cable operator’s Spectrum Mobile service diverts most of its wireless traffic away from pricey Verizon network usage and onto its millions of residential and public Wi-Fi hotspots, as well as its proprietary Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) small cells.

Might SpaceX lease the non-Verizon portion of that solution?

“We talk to many industry players,” Charter CEO Chris Winfrey said during last week’s Q2 call, marginalizing the report.

With SPCX shares descending to $113.50 on Monday, Musk had shifted his focus to Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of The Economist, who interviewed the Musk last week.

During the full 90-minute interview, Minton Beddoes challenged Musk on his political orientation — what you may call “far right” he calls “just normal.” He was asked about stoking fear and loathing in the UK, after describing on X last month “Murderous migrants beheading innocent people” in a country that actually has infrequent instances of violent crime, and which he admittedly hasn’t visited in several years.

Minton Beddoes also asked him if he was racist — he couldn’t be, Musk responded incredulously, because the woman he currently lives with is of half-Indian descent. (Does he even know about the famously bi-racial romantic liaisons of Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner?)

It’s all there. On video. No fake news possible.

Musk, a self-proclaimed free-speech advocate, on several occasions reiterated his disdain for the media. And after the interview culminated, he took to his social media platform, X, to discredit his interrogator — a respected journalist, the daughter of a British military officer and a devout champion of free markets and speech. Musk called her a “traitor to the West.”

And when he was oh so gently challenged on that brutal assertion by José Andrés, noted Spanish chef, restauranteur and humanitarian — Musk once again reminded us who he really is.

Do savvy, strategic global communications technology leaders, those with enough patience and forethought to build their own terrestrial wireless networks, typically respond this way?

The world’s richest man is regularly involved in such behavioral travesties.

Still, many of us have spent the last 60 days with our hair on fire, just absolutely sure this reckless, impulsive, modern-day P.T. Barnum would soon control the very phone in our pocket.

Decorum doesn’t count for much around here these days. But fortunately, calmer captains of the $1.6 trillion U.S telecom business understand that real market threats do require emotional control and focus.

Musk and fellow billionaire low-earth orbit entrepreneur Jeff Bezos still have the regulatory wind at their back, with the FCC’s adoption last week of a self-described “assembly-line mindset” for green-lighting satellite approvals being only the latest overt example of agency favoritism.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr still insists that he also favors Bezos, and that it’s the broader space business he’s really cheerleading for. But let’s not forget that it was Musk who donated nearly $300 billion to the president whom Carr, son of a Nixon lawyer, so obsequiously serves.

Still, the midterm elections are just 98 days away. Washington’s “vibe shift” of 2024 has decidedly shifted back. The president’s “Save Act” — a deceptive ploy to manipulate the coming election — is currently listed on Kalshi at 7% for passing the Senate.

Unless the president chooses once again to venture deep into Constitutional crisis — and most of us understand that he just might — it’s the Dems who are heavily favored to win control of the House in November. And Carr might just be spending much of 2027 testifying in front of Democratic-led House committees, not gaming the communications business for Musk and Bezos.

As for for those guys, they might have to answer to a few subpoenas, as well. And who knows at this point how hard the winds of the left will blow … and if they’ll reach into low-earth orbit. Will a younger, more extremist group of House Dem lawmakers target the perfectly useful — and niche — D2D satellite business to punish the oligarchs who back it?

Heck, they’re effectively campaigning on it right now.

And it should be noted that amid all the sturm und drang during and around Musk’s horrible Economist interview performance, the specific subject of the U.S. telecom business never came up. Not once.

Threat averted.

— Daniel Frankel

Sign up for a free trial of Attio, the agentic CRM.

Ask Attio to build a daily workflow that surfaces the deals that need your attention today, like anything with a stage change, a recent reply, or a new signal in the last 24 hours.

Review your pipeline in Claude, synced live from Attio via MCP.

That's it.

Try Attio Now

When he’s not getting “carried away” with massive cuts to the United States government, the world’s richest man is admitting that building humanoid robots may take a little longer than some originally expected.

“This is going to be the hardest product to scale manufacturing that we’ve ever made at Tesla because everything on the robot is new,” Tesla CEO Musk said during the company’s second-quarter earnings call last week.

In fact, Musk and his corporate cohorts at the electric car maker are spending like drunken sailors — Musk described 2026 as “a massive capex year” — on Optimus robot development, massive AI projects and the Cybercab rollout.

The returns on developing a reliable humanoid robot could be substantial, but there’s a lot of building and development that Tesla will have to do before its Optimus bot becomes commonplace.

Barclays Investment Bank has said that the market for AI-enabled humanoid robots will reach a value of $40 billion by 2035, with the market currently valued at $2 billion to $3 billion.

Over the next few years, Tesla will have to further develop supplier relationships and construct new components itself in order to build a supply chain for the Optimus robots. Tesla does not currently have enough AI chips to build out large amounts of automatons.

Tesla said that Micron has supplied a significant amount of memory components at a good price for the robot project. The company also said that Samsung and TSMC are building semiconductor plants that could help support the bot rollout as well.

Skip the sales call. Walk through Gladly's interface yourself — the AI suggestions, the unified customer view, the full conversation thread. 15 minutes, no installation, no commitment.

See it yourself

The predicted rise of humanoid robots is also closely linked to cellular 5G and the increased deployment of private 5G networks in Asia, Europe and North America, as such networks can provide the un-congested, low-latency connectivity that the biped robots will need to operate on factory floors and more.

Still, all of the building around the Optimus project, as well as the robotaxi and AI work will blast Tesla’s capex into the stratosphere. Tesla’s CFO, Vaibhav Taneja, said that the capital expenditure would top $25 billion this year.

This is a drastic increase on 2025, where capex spending for the year hit $8.53 billion.

Tesla has shut down its Model S and X electric vehicle production lines in its Fremont, Calif. factory and is putting in an Optimus assembly line in instead.

Production is expected to start in the third quarter, although the first units won’t be made available commercially but will instead be used for training and to develop new features for the biped robots.

Musk warned that the initial rollout of the bots would be “quite flat and long.” The CEO has previously said that Optimus robots will be available at the end of 2027.

Of course Musk is known for his multiple, grandiose pronouncements on projects his companies are working on. Consider that the CEO first promised “complete autonomy” for Teslas in December 2015 and actually delivered commercial Full Self Driving (FSD) — albeit human supervised — to all of its customers in May 2024.

As with many of Musk’s projections, the robot emphasis is on the bots being built out soon.

“Tesla could potentially emerge as a prime mover in Western markets in the future,” Asad Khan, 5G research director at SNS Telecom & IT told Next TMT Networks when I looked at the humanoid robot scene recently.

The SNS analyst noted, however, that Tesla’s shipment volumes — as of early June this year — was fewer than 200 units annually, compared to more than 5,000 units from Chinese suppliers such as AgiBot. Musk said on Tesla’s Q4 2025 earnings call that the Tesla will eventually produce 1 million Optimus robots a year at its Fremont factory.

Despite — or perhaps because of — the high-flying Optimus predictions, Tesla’s stock suffered a precipitous plunge of 18% on the weaker-than-expected earnings for the core EV business and the extravagant capex expectations.

Shares were still down 1.15% Monday at $309.44.

— Dan Jones

Opening entities in every country can be slow, expensive, and hard to scale.

That's why more companies are using EOR to hire globally faster.

See how Oyster helps teams hire, pay, and support talent in 180+ countries while staying compliant along the way.

Get all the answers

Nokia and Ericsson are both eager to win military wireless contracts as many armies and navies are currently updating their forces with 5G services. 

For instance, Ericsson was recently selected for the United Kingdom's Tactical Communication Systems framework, a major procurement program worth up to 8 billion pounds over the next eight years. The vendor was selected to supply services and components.

“In the UK's Project Morpheus, Ericsson's initial commitment is to provide rapidly deployable 5G infrastructure for tactical communications,” SNS’s Khan told us in an email. “The Swedish telecommunications giant is also making significant R&D investments in ISAC (Integrated Sensing & Communications) technology for applications such as counter-drone protection.”

AvidThink’s principal analyst Roy Chua said that tactical 5G can connect drones and other un-crewed platforms, carry high-bandwidth intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance video and sensor data, and link those systems into command-and-control environments.

“Ericsson is also developing ISAC, which uses the radio network itself to detect and track drones,” he said. “That one is still early-stage, so I'd keep near-term drone connectivity separate from the more forward-looking sensing proposition. Different propositions with different maturity of technologies.”

Chua noted that Ericsson hasn’t actually won any of the UK military drone business yet.

“On drones and uncrewed systems — I'd expect Ericsson to chase this work, but being selected for RM6393 puts Ericsson on a procurement vehicle; it doesn't mean the company has won part of an £8 billion contract,” he said. “That figure is the ceiling for the entire eight-year framework across many suppliers, and Ericsson still has to win individual call-offs.”

The UK's drone commitment is a separate line within the same investment plan — more than £5 billion over four years for drones and autonomous systems across the armed forces. “It does signal demand, but it isn't earmarked for Ericsson or for this framework as far as I know,” Chua noted.

Ericsson is working with other militaries on 5G as well as the UK. “Ericsson and Telia are working with the Swedish Armed Forces to test 5G Standalone capabilities including prioritized connectivity, positioning and temporary coverage, with NATO interoperability as an explicit objective,” Chua said.

“Ericsson and Leonardo have also completed a live maritime trial with the Italian Navy that carried information between two ships plus video from 12 uncrewed systems.”

“As per our database of private 5G projects, Ericsson has recently supplied its 5G infrastructure to militaries in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Hungary and Latvia, as well as a large-scale project with an undisclosed country in the Asia Pacific region, which we don't have permission to disclose at the moment,” added SNS’s Khan.

AvidThink’s Chua noted that there is a lot of cash in play for United States military projects.

“Ericsson Federal's place on the Missile Defense Agency's SHIELD vehicle is a good example, but I think the $151 billion is the shared ceiling on a large multiple-award vehicle,” he said. “This is eligibility to compete for task orders, but not revenue already awarded to Ericsson.”

Chua stated that Nokia Federal is also on the same vehicle. “They announced about a week after Ericsson did,” he said.

“The strategic intent to go after this opportunity is clear for both of them. But actual revenue opportunity depends on execution, trials and partnerships into funded deployments … that will take time to sort out,” the analyst noted.

The defense market is a growing market for both Ericsson and Nokia, but not one that they are crowing about the money from yet.

“I would say that defense is a strategic growth market for both, but not yet a major reported revenue pillar for either,”  Chua noted. “[Current CEO] Ekholm declined to size Ericsson's current defence deals on the January call, and Ericsson Federal hasn't appeared in any Ericsson financial statement since it was set up in 2024 even if he said it was ‘sizeable.’”

“Nokia is more explicit organizationally. It has incubated Nokia Defense as a dedicated go-to-market and R&D unit, and it packages tactical products more overtly.” Chua said. “Nokia seems to sells through defence primes and integrators; Ericsson appears to be pushing to sell direct into military procurement vehicles.”

“Both Nokia and Ericsson view the defense sector as one of the largest growth segments for mission-critical 5G networks,” SNS’s Khan added. “We project that cumulative spending on 5G infrastructure contracts for military customers will reach $2.4 billion between 2026 and 2029.”

— D.J.