The world’s tech industry just shit itself.

SpaceX’s (SPCX) quarterly report last night was the most extraordinary earnings call I’ve ever heard. And it signals the beginning of a death march for many of the industry’s existing business models.

Let’s start with communications bandwidth.

SpaceX’s satellite internet service Starlink added 1.6 million subscribers in Q3 – reaching 13.6 million users. That’s still small compared with the big American phone companies – Verizon (VZ) has 147 million wireless connections and AT&T (T) has 110 million. T-Mobile (TMUS) no longer reports its line count, but at the end of June it had 34.7 million postpaid accounts, many of them with several lines each.

As an investor though, you must look at where the “ball” is going.

Starlink had 2.3 million subscribers at the end of 2023. It had 4.4 million at the end of 2024. It had 8.9 million at the end of 2025. It added another 4.7 million in the first nine months of this year.

Starlink’s 1.6 million new customers in Q3 compares with 379,000 new postpaid phone customers at AT&T in the same quarter, and 184,000 at Verizon in Q2. Oh, also, about 12,000 airplanes have signed up for the service too, with Starlink availability becoming a major competitive factor between Delta Air Lines (DAL) (which doesn’t have it) and United Airlines (UAL) (which does).

In a few years… it seems likely that SpaceX will put every other communications network out of business.