Musk Tweets He Is in Talks With Airlines to Install Starlink Broadband

Musk Tweets He Is in Talks With Airlines to Install Starlink Broadband
Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks during the E3 gaming convention in Los Angeles, Calif., on June 13, 2019. (Mike Blake/Reuters)
Reuters
10/15/2021
Updated:
10/15/2021

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk said in a tweet on Thursday he was in talks with airlines about installing Starlink, a satellite-based broadband service owned by his rocket company SpaceX.

Musk, who is known for his Twitter banter, announcements, and lively interactions with followers, did not provide any details about the talks in his tweet. It was not immediately clear which airlines were approached or when installation would occur.

Shares of in-flight internet provider Gogo Inc fell to an intraday low of 5.7 percent before recouping some of the losses in afternoon trading.

Starlink, the satellite internet unit of SpaceX, plans to deploy 12,000 satellites. SpaceX has said the Starlink constellation will cost it roughly $10 billion.

It is one of a growing number of companies making small satellites that also includes Amazon.com’s Kuiper, Britain’s OneWeb, venture capital-backed Planet, and Raytheon Technologies Corp’s Blue Canyon Technologies.

Musk currently helms companies including electric-car maker Tesla Inc, rocket startup SpaceX and Neuralink, a startup that is developing ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect the human brain to computers.

By Chavi Mehta and Subrat Patnaik