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It's worth noting that United Launch Alliance (ULA), one of their main competitors, is a joint Lockheed-Boeing project rather forcefully spun off from lawsuits between the two major market players. In the interest of continued service (neither going bankrupt and ending production), they were effectively forced to work together in 2006. I think your prediction is right: a forced sale to one of the larger government contractors, followed by re-evaluating the continual loss-leader strategy Musk seems to like.
On the subject of Starlink specifically, I had a project to estimate the market feasibility of such a service before it started launching, and at least my result was that it probably can't be profitable at the list prices. There is a chance it could be selling to the government, but there aren't enough people in OP's position to pay landline ISP prices to fund the operating costs for the launches, the ground stations, and staffing.
The US at least has spent a ton of money running fiber to rural areas in the last few decades, which doesn't require too much ongoing upkeep.
My (Musk-skeptic) view is that Starlink exists to provide a regular payload for Falcon 9: despite promises that cheaper launches would increase demand, they seem to have largely flushed out the wait lists and have actually seen a decline in commercial launches in recent years. "Exponential growth" wasn't going to keep banner launch rates up without making payloads themselves. The satellites and ground terminals themselves seem to work, although not as well as originally promised: do they have cross-links like Iridium had in the 90s? How much power do the ground terminals draw?
The economics of private companies mean that its hard from the outside to view their profitability. On the other hand, I've long predicted that empire dissolving, and I've admittedly been wrong about the timeline for that so far.
My understanding is that the Starlink has three potentially profitable strategies, all of which depend on inter-satellite links to really be breakthroughs:
HFT without fiber latency. This is where clients will be able to pay eight to nine figure subscriptions per year, with major routes forming a high speed web between New York, London, Brussels, Singapore, and Tokyo.
Military/aviation. It's hard to put a dollar value on military contracts, but this is probably seven to eight figures per year total, since military already has their own communications web.
Worldwide consumer access with less than worldwide infrastructure. Note that once access (downlinks) are installed for the above contracts, the marginal cost to expand civilian access to the globe is almost nil. The cost of satellite launch may be spilt between customers across the entire broadcast range: Africa, Europe, Asia, all the ocean shipping and cruise ships, etc.
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