Tushar Mehta / Android Authority
Well, here we are again, a billionaire is making a phone. Forgive me for sounding less than excited. Like, we’ve been here before. We’ve seen totally legitimate not-criminals ranging from Pablo Escobar to the President of the United States announce that they were getting into the smartphone game, only for the former’s CEO to be convicted of fraud and the latter, well, we’re still waiting on our Trump Phone to ship.
So, you can imagine my excitement with the news that Elon Musk is apparently kicking around the idea of launching a Starlink-powered SpaceX phone. It’s definitely, totally going to happen, and it doesn’t at all seem like something that will backfire and cause other networks to move away from Starlink. Just kidding, here’s why I don’t think anything will come of the SpaceX phone.
Elon Musk makes a lot of promises, but doesn’t keep many
Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
Now, I don’t want to compare a SpaceX product to the unfulfilled promises of Elon Musk’s other companies. But when the list of swings and misses from Tesla is this long, it’s hard not to. I mean, the Roadster was tapped to relaunch way back in 2020, and MKBHD is still waiting for his — as far as we know. Tesla was also supposed to make an ATV, the Cybertruck was rumored to work as a boat, and Full Self-Driving is still a paywalled, supervised work in progress.
Oh, and that’s not to mention the fact that Tesla is going to begin phasing out the Model X and Model S in the near future. Soon enough, they’ll be relics only seen making the rounds in the Las Vegas Hyperloop.
Musk makes promises at roughly the same rate that Google retires products...
Granted, I can’t actually list a Tesla-branded phone among Elon Musk’s list of broken promises. Sure, it’s long been rumored, and there have been AI-generated renderings of a Tesla Pi Phone on various corners of the internet, but Musk has never claimed to make one himself — until now. This time, though, at least he’s wise enough not to use the Tesla name.
Honestly, I think that Musk aligning his first smartphone with SpaceX is a smart move. After all, I have family members who pay for Starlink at their cabins, and I personally love the idea of a satellite network that enables remote communication. It’s not far off from what Garmin’s InReach platform is designed to do, but Starlink makes it way more reasonable to send memes via satellite rather than reserve it for emergency use.
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