Elon Musk Plans to Have 42,000 Satellites Circling the Earth

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jun 10, 7:19AM EDT · Published Jun 9, 6:16AM EDT

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Elon Musk Plans to Have 42,000 Satellites Circling the Earth — © Robert Daemmrich Photography Inc / Getty Images

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Elon Musk plans to eventually have 42,000 Starlink satellites circling the Earth.

Elon Musk is best known for his positions as CEO of Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA | TSLA Price Prediction), the company that brought electric vehicles (EVs) to the masses, and SpaceX, the most active commercial rocket company that dominated the industry, as well as being the head of Neuralink, which connects computers to the brain. Less well-known is his plan to eventually have 42,000 satellites circling the Earth.

To give Musk’s plan some context, less than 10,000 satellites circle the world today. The number will grow, but the growth rate would be modest without Musk’s Starlink satellite additions.

Starlink is a satellite-based broadband network. When it is finished, everyone in the world, on paper, will have access to the internet. The service reaches much of the world today. PCMag reports, “Starlink solves a problem that has plagued modern broadband for years: How to reach the rural and remote users who aren’t accessible to traditional cable and fiber internet.” At some point, this coverage will be available in the most remote places in the world. Starlink has just added eight African nations to its footprint.

Starlink has been built on Musk’s SpaceX rockets. One of its huge Falcon 9 rockets recently released another 20 Spacelink satellites into low orbit. Musk has used one of his companies to make a second company possible.

It has been said, often, that Musk’s ambitions don’t have boundaries. Starlink is more proof of that.

This is the largest rocket launched into space.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.