🚀 SpaceX Wants Your Phone Bill

28 Wishes sells ice cream in Los Angeles. Below 70°F, sales fall about 20%. The weather is out of their hands. Rent isn't.

So the owners started putting about $20 a day into Kalshi weather markets, taking the cold side. The days that keep customers away now pay something back.

This is hedging. Big companies have done it for decades, buying protection against bad weather, fuel spikes and rising rates. It used to take a broker, a trading desk, and an order size no corner shop could meet.

Kalshi opens it up. Contracts on weather, fuel prices, inflation, tariffs and regulation, starting at a few dollars. Take a position on the outcome that would hurt you. If it hits, the payout softens it. If it doesn't, the contract expires and the good month was the point.

See how other owners are doing it at Kalshi.com/hedging

SpaceX wants to be your phone company.

And it's reportedly paying around $8 billion to get started.

On Oct. 8, SpaceX $SPCX ( ▲ 0.52% ) agreed to buy Grain Management's 800 MHz spectrum portfolio, up to 14 MHz of paired airwaves.

Fun detail: Grain bought that exact spectrum from T-Mobile in August for $2.9 billion in cash plus some extra licenses.

If the $8 billion figure holds, that's nearly triple the money in about two months. Somebody at Grain deserves a very large bonus.

One caveat: neither side has confirmed the price, and the FCC still has to sign off.

Pivotal Research thinks the deal could turn SpaceX into America's fourth major wireless carrier.

It raised its price target to $230 from $220 and kept its Buy rating. That's roughly 55% upside from the $147.95 share price cited in its Oct. 12 report.

Why does this matter? Because building a phone network is usually brutally expensive.

A traditional nationwide tower network costs $50 billion to $100 billion. Pivotal reckons SpaceX could pull it off for about $10 billion, excluding spectrum.

That's 5 to 10 times cheaper. Here's the recipe:

Basically, your Starlink dish moonlights as a cell tower. 🫡

The first target is rural and suburban customers, especially existing Starlink users who could bundle home internet and mobile.

Cities are a tougher sell. The big carriers have far more spectrum and capacity there.

Pivotal forecasts 160 million Starlink Mobile subscriptions by 2036. That's 50 million in the US (about 13% of the market) and 110 million abroad (1.5% excluding China), paying roughly $22 a month on average.

The timeline is long. Subscribers start arriving in late 2027 or 2028, with EBITDA turning positive in 2030.

From there, Pivotal sees $3.5 billion of segment EBITDA in 2032 and $15 billion by 2036, at a 40% margin. Total capex: $30.6 billion from 2027 to 2036, mostly spectrum ($22.5 billion) plus $8.1 billion for satellites.

The sneaky bigger prize? A network Musk controls himself, powering Tesla cars, Cybercab robotaxis, Optimus robots and energy installations without renting from anyone. Other carriers might even pay SpaceX for wholesale access in empty rural areas.

Should AT&T and Verizon panic? Not yet. Pivotal sees no immediate dividend pressure, though cheaper architecture could eventually shrink demand for some rural towers.

Now the fine print. Pivotal estimates SpaceX may need about $900 billion in extra financing over the next decade across satellites, launch and AI infrastructure. That's 90 times the cost of the phone network itself.

Add Starship delays, dilution, regulators, international spectrum hurdles and heavy reliance on Musk. The valuation also leans hard on the final years of a 10-year forecast.

Meanwhile, Morgan Stanley is even bolder: Overweight and a $300 target, betting that full rocket reusability (watch Starship Flight 15) speeds up everything else.

The SpaceX bull case now has a second story beyond rockets and broadband. But most of the payoff sits a decade out, and it needs a mountain of cash to get there.

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The war in Iran has cost the average US household nearly $2,000.

That's over just eight months. Nobody sent you an invoice, but you've been paying it anyway.

Moody's Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi ran the numbers, and the total hit to the US economy comes to $265 billion.

That's roughly $1 billion a day, every day, since the conflict started.

Here's where your money went.

Energy is the biggest chunk: about $1,100 per household.

That covers pricier fuel, higher home heating bills, and the extra cost of trucking goods to the shops you buy from.

The scoreboard at the pump:

And the meter is still running. At current prices, the weekly energy tab keeps rising by about $50 per household.

That's a decent takeaway every single week, poured straight into a fuel tank.

Higher interest rates add another $540 per household.

The domino chain goes like this: war pushes up energy, energy pushes up inflation, inflation pushes the Fed to hike.

Result? Fixed mortgage rates hit ~7.5%, up from below 6% before the conflict.

For scale: on a $300K, 30-year mortgage, going from 6% to 7.5% adds roughly $300 a month. Same house. Bigger bill.

The final $360 per household is the military operation itself.

That's based on acknowledged Pentagon spending, funded by taxpayers. Which is a polite way of saying "you."

Stack it up: $1,100 in energy, $540 in rates, $360 in military costs. That's how you get to nearly $2,000.

Here's the gut punch: these costs have eaten roughly half of the average household's income gains over the past eight months.

So that pay rise you got this year? Half of it was spoken for before it reached your bank account.

What it means for your money:

Elon Musk has "no idea how to make microchips."

He's building a chip factory anyway.

Speaking by livestream at the X Takeover event on Saturday, Musk told customers and investors outside Tesla's Austin gigafactory that his companies could likely make chips better than anyone else.

His supporting evidence? Admitting he has no clue how chips are made, then adding: "we'll figure it out."

That's the confidence of a man building IKEA furniture with the instructions still sealed in the box.

Musk's argument comes down to custom equipment.

He said that on tours of rival facilities, he didn't spot much specialized, custom-built machinery.

Tesla and SpaceX build that kind of kit all the time. Musk reckons that's how you squeeze a better manufacturing process out of a factory.

In a sentence? The chip world mostly buys its tools. Musk wants to make his own.

Earlier this month, Musk said Tesla $TSLA ( ▼ 1.22% ) and SpaceX $SPCX ( ▲ 0.52% ) will build and run the Terafab AI chip complex.

TSMC $TSM ( ▼ 1.98% ) might sublease part of it.

When someone on X suggested the likeliest outcome was TSMC owning and running the fab, Musk fired back:

"No, we will build and run the fab. Let there be ZERO doubt about that."

Caps lock engaged. Message received. 🫡

Chipmaking is one of the hardest manufacturing jobs on Earth. The companies that do it well spent decades getting there.

So treat Terafab as a long-dated bet. Nothing here shows up in next quarter's numbers.

For TSLA holders, Musk's ambitions keep stretching further from cars. That can mean bigger upside, and also bigger spending and longer timelines.

For TSM holders, the sublease is the bit to watch. TSMC could end up as a tenant inside a would-be rival's fab, which is either a smart partnership or a very awkward flatshare.

Musk has a habit of hitting wildly ambitious goals, usually later than promised. Keep both halves of that sentence in mind.