Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Höttges used his Thursday earnings call to do two things at once: welcome Elon Musk to the mobile business, and price the entry ticket at around $200 billion.
"I take that super serious," Höttges said of SpaceX's plan to make Starlink Mobile a major US carrier, according to The Verge. Then he did the arithmetic. SpaceX has bought 76 megahertz of spectrum, he said, while Deutsche Telekom holds 400. Buying a comparable position would run into "triple-digit billions." Building a network would add $20–30 billion, even renting tower space; T-Mobile alone operates 85,000 towers. Add antennas and the rest, and "SpaceX at least — if they want to play in that industry — needs at least minimum $200 billion." His conclusion: "welcome to the party."
The skepticism is not dismissal. Höttges argued the threat is category-level rather than a copy of an existing carrier. Musk, he noted, has chipsets, data centers, AI and satellites, and will likely fold social media or agent models into the service: "he is creating a new way of communication services." He compared the industry to carmakers who ignored Tesla for too long — with the caveat that Tesla also shows "it's not a free lunch."
SpaceX is not waiting for permission. Last month it laid out plans to take on T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon with a mix of direct-to-cell satellites and a terrestrial network. Reporting suggests it could tap as many as 80,000 US cell towers, and that Musk has discussed acquiring Boost Mobile — a shortcut that would still require carrier consent from AT&T and T-Mobile. This week Qualcomm confirmed SpaceX will use its cellular infrastructure technology for the buildout, with work starting in 2027. Höttges, for his part, urged US carriers not to hand SpaceX an MVNO deal.
Investors have already moved past the argument. Press coverage this week described Deutsche Telekom as "irritated" that the market treats Starlink Mobile as a threat so soon, and its own executives concede that a SpaceX wireless threat is already being priced in. For T-Mobile the near-term risk is less about losing subscribers to a satellite carrier that does not yet exist at scale than about the wholesale and spectrum math changing underneath it. For SpaceX, the next data points are whether a Boost deal clears carrier consent, and whether the first commercial service arrives before the $200 billion bill does.
