10 March

Doing some more research on Starlink, which some of my friends have been using already for ages. The genius of it in the technical and business sense hit me when researching internet options for one of my kids moving into a flat in Sydney. I was flabbergated to find that Starlink was easily (almost 50%) cheaper than any ground-based option for them, and could offer double or quadruple the speed. On top of that it’s far easier to order and set up. This is the genius of Elon Musk, that isn’t appreciated as much because his personal views on other things are so obnoxious. If you’d said ‘I’m going to launch satellites into low orbit and offer broadband to every pointer on the globe, no matter how remote, at high speeds and low latency, and at low prices, with a 5-minute setup process’, people would have thought you were insane. But - he did it. And it’s not only profitable, its profitability is growing all the time. It’s a staggering achievement. One of the brutal truths of humans being driven by status above all else is that a company that offers seamless, amazing things to customers is almost always one led in an ‘authoritarian’ way. Otherwise status games *within* the company destroy the relationship of the company to outsiders. For that reason effective CEOs will pretty much always appear to be arseholes. (I included the Telstra ad for their satellite broadband, which they’ve now given up on trying to do themselves and simply re-package Starlink.)