In mid-January 2026, during the anti-government uprising in Iran, Starlink waived its monthly subscription payments for users in Iran after the imamocracy blacked out the internet. Mahsa Alimardani, technospecialist at the human rights organisation Witness, told CNN, “Estimates say there are around 50,000 Starlink receivers in Iran.”
Here’s why the maths is shot: 50,000 terminals served a population of 9.2 crore, 80 percent of which are net-connected via 15.1 crore cellphones. Since one Starlink terminal can work 128-235 phones simultaneously, Starlink was servicing between 64 lakh and 1.1 crore devices. That’s around 4-8 percent of all phones in the country. A few days later, the world’s media reported extensively on the internet lockdown: Starlink terminals were estimated at up to 100,000. Suddenly confident stats about Starlink’s reach began flooding the information market.
Starlink has never had a licence to operate in Iran, although thousands of its terminals have been smuggled into the country since 2022, when President Joe Biden permitted US companies to bypass sanctions. All this busy aerial connectivity was underground. Like every other internet service provider, Starlink knows exactly how many paid subscribers it has in Iran, but its profits lie in keeping quiet.
In January 2025, Pouya Pirhosseinloo, head of the Internet and Infrastructure Committee of the Tehran E-Commerce Association, said that “over 30,000 unique users are utilising satellite internet”. In October 2025, Iran banned the “use, possession, purchase, sale, or import of unlicensed electronic, internet, or satellite communication devices—such as Starlink—for personal use”. It’s therefore improbable that in nine months the number of Starlink terminals shot up and actually tripled during the uprising. Starlink only became a free subscription in January 2026. For four years, therefore, Iranians paid $74 per month, along with a minimum hardware cost of $399. That’s nearly $4,000 per subscriber in a faltering economy.
Worldwide, 9,422 Starlink satellites service 90 lakh subscribers—or a paltry 955 subscribers per satellite. Each satellite costs roughly $10 lakh to build and launch, which works out to about $1,000 per subscriber. There is $940-crore-worth of Starlink hardware floating about in low Earth orbit. So far, so good.
Each satellite has a built-in five-year lifespan. Assuming the most basic straight-line decay, lifecycle analysis and depreciation planning show that 20 percent of a product with a five-year lifespan will annually age out of service. Ergo, roughly five satellites fall out of the sky every day.
“The problem,” reported The Motley Fool, “is that SpaceX is progressing toward 12,000 Starlinks in orbit, requiring 2,400 satellites, meaning 104 launches per year to replace old satellites. At an estimated cost of $500,000 to build each satellite, plus $67 million per Falcon 9 to launch them, this implies an annual cost of about $8.2 billion per year—just to keep the satellite constellation at full strength.”
The logic of Starlink revenues of $1,870 crore in 2026 posited by Payload Space is also whacked. According to Forbes, ‘Internal and external estimates indicate that Starlink’s revenues in 2024 were about 8.2 billion dollars’, and that ‘independent projections suggest Starlink alone may reach approximately 15.9 billion dollars in revenue in 2026’. That’s a 15 percent projected increase in the year’s revenue, without proof.
There’s more spin. Reuters reported, “Starlink is a vital profit generator for SpaceX. Last year, the company generated about $8 billion in profit on $15 billion to $16 billion of revenue…with Starlink as the main revenue driver, accounting for about 50-80 percent of the total.” That is, SpaceX’s profits comprised 50 percent of its revenue, and Starlink contributed between half and three-fourths of SpaceX’s profits. This is an impossible profit-to-revenue ratio.
Starlink aimed to rope in 2.3 percent of the world’s online userbase by 2025, but it has a mere 0.15 percent—a shortfall of 93.5 percent. Elon Musk is planning a SpaceX initial public offering in 2026 to raise up to $5000 crore, reports Bloomberg. The IPO will really be about Starlink—with questionable subscriber growth and stability, symbiotic with US foreign policy of regime-change and expansionism, backed by progeric hardware, and an owner-CEO-CTO prone to overhype.
Many projections demonstrate a cute refusal to differ between revenue, profit and weasel terms like ‘profitable territory’. In truth, however, insiders have described Starlink’s accounting as ‘more art than science’. Bloomberg wrote in 2024 that Starlink ‘often strips out the hefty cost of sending its satellites into space to make the non-public numbers look better to investors’ and that ‘it’s not actually profitable based on an operational and ongoing basis’.
So, what purpose, aside from hypercorporate profiteering blarney, is propping up Starlink? Politics, definitely. Starlink has been in and out of a host of conflict zones, usually at the behest of the US State department. (Elon Musk made Starlink subscriptions free in Iran soon after the US-approved uprising broke out.) It’s the longest arm of US foreign policy.
Musk has kept Starlink’s market cap close to his chest, making extrapolation necessary from SpaceX’s private evaluation, which ranges from $40,000 crore to $1,25,000 crore (after SpaceX’s merger with xAI). No one knows. In January 2017, Starlink was expected to reach an annual revenue of more than $3,000 crore by 2025. It’s not even close.
Like Musk himself, Starlink’s financials are a farrago.
Kajal Basu | Veteran journalist
(Views are personal)
(kajalrbasu@gmail.com)