Starlink could be seen as a 'fire sale' of launch capacity rather than a sound business move.
Claims are based on nonsense.
Launch 20 million satellites at 600k is clear from reading the financials
Starlink's launch costs are not booked as costs to Starlink (nor revenue to Space). They're booked as depreciation over an undefined time period.
The fuel would have to be expensed, but generally speaking its impossible to say how unprofitable Starlink is because they don't account for it that way or break those costs out.
When they swallow Tesla it'll be more of the same, and thats the point. Musk is trying to obfuscate the (poor) performance of his businesses so he can maintain delusional market valuations based of vague promises.
The costs aren't hiding somewhere vague.
The entire "space launch" segment in the red by $1.1bn. Primary driver being the $3.3bn spent on Starship R&D.
How are they "burying it into a different business segment", pray tell me?
If you remove Starship, Falcon launches and Starlink are both independently profitable. And Starship wasn't even used for Starlink until the one test launch this year.
It costs me $5 in labor and $20 in ingredients
My margin is -25%
I account for the ingredients as depreciating assets over a 100 year lifespan
It now costs me $5 in labor and $0.09 in ingredients
My margin is now 74%
You can drop SpaceX's launch revenue to zero, fund all of it with Starlink revenue, and the sum is still profitable.
We know "whether Starlink is a viable business": it is. End of story. You better start pivoting towards "but what if future competition" or "the revenue growth is uncertain", because your attempts to wiggle your way out of admitting that Starlink is a money printer now are weak at best.
You can't just say "they're hiding the launch costs" and expect it to magically make Starlink unprofitable. Starlink has been bearing launch costs for its entire existence, and if anything, the advent of Starship is likely to make them lower, not higher.