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| Elon Musk plans to make Starlink a public company |
Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, said he plans to make a public announcement when cash flow is more predictable.
Starlink, currently operated by space exploration company SpaceX, enables people to connect to the Internet through satellite antennas.
The Internet is broadcast on the Starlink satellite, which SpaceX sends into orbit.
"It will be very difficult to market early on," Musk said in a tweet. "In the long run, I will do everything in my power to put Tesla shareholders first.
The billionaire's tweet came after a Twitter user asked him what he thought of the Starlink IPO.
"Starlink can be separated from SpaceX during its IPO," SpaceX President Gwen Shotwell said last year.
Headquartered in Redmond, Washington, Starlink hopes to bring faster Internet access to the world, the first of which is to improve Internet access in areas where there is currently no broadband provider in the world.
He plans to achieve this goal by placing thousands of small communications satellites in low Earth orbit that can send Internet to Earth at high speed and low latency.
Starlink Project
Starlink is currently testing its services with customers in 11 countries including the United States and the United Kingdom.
Musk said in May that the company had received more than 500,000 initial inquiries for internet services and did not expect any technical issues in responding to the inquiries.
Shotwell said Starlink should be able to provide continuous global coverage by September.
"We have successfully deployed about 1,800 satellites," she added via a webcast at the Macquarie Group technical conference. Once all of these satellites are in orbit, we will have continuous global coverage. So the period should be September.
Starlink has announced plans to launch a total of 12,000 satellites at a cost of nearly $10 billion.
Musk said in May that Starlink would be a major source of funding for some of its other plans, including sending paying customers to Mars and colonizing Mars.
In an interview last March, Musk said that SpaceX could generate up to $30 billion annually from broadband provision. They are useful for telecom companies because they serve the most demanding customers.