“You can assume that we’re talking to all parties,” the chief executive of infrastructure company Crown Castle said on Wednesday, when asked whether the company was discussing leases with SpaceX or other satellite companies. In the same week, Elon Musk turned up at both ends of the route to the American viewer, with the HBO and CNN content at one end and, at the other, the towers SpaceX is negotiating over for its own mobile network. According to unnamed sources cited by Semafor, he invested roughly $1 billion in Skydance, the new owner of HBO and CNN. A day before that report, cable magnate John Malone predicted a deal between the studio and SpaceX, though he did not indicate that negotiations were underway.
Skydance needs both the deal and the money. In October 2026 the company completed its takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. It also owns two film studios, two streaming services and the CBS television network. The combined group carries debt of nearly $80 billion. Musk’s money arrived as a much-needed injection for a company that wants to cut costs and lift its share price.
How SpaceX is assembling a mobile operator
Bigger sums than Musk’s stake in the studio are heading to the other end of the route. In September 2025 SpaceX agreed to buy spectrum for Starlink’s satellite mobile service from the operator EchoStar for roughly $17 billion. In October 2026 it added a deal to buy nationwide low-band licences. According to Bloomberg, SpaceX wants to secure at least 80,000 sites for transmitters in the US for a fourth nationwide mobile operator, and is still only negotiating over the towers. On SpaceX’s earnings call, Musk promised terrestrial networks with broad coverage “anywhere that SpaceX and Starlink are allowed to operate”.
Starlink’s European route into phones also runs through Deutsche Telekom. From early 2028, Telekom is due to connect its customers’ phones in Germany and several of its other European markets directly to Starlink satellites. Czechia is one of those markets, Czech T-Mobile confirmed on X. It did not specify a date for Czechia, however.
On 19 October, Telekom and three other European operators signed a letter of intent to explore a joint bid for European spectrum for satellite mobile services. According to analyst Luke Kehoe of Ookla, Starlink’s push into the US mobile market has put European operators on the defensive, who do not want to sell somebody else’s service on somebody else’s terms.
Malone’s prediction for Skydance and Musk’s SpaceX
In Malone’s prediction, Skydance would sign a global output deal with SpaceX, and SpaceX would invest in the studio to delever it and take some of the burden off the shoulders of its chief executive, David Ellison. He put the cross-investment at eight or ten billion dollars. Money has already flowed once in the opposite direction, from the elder Ellison to Musk. In 2022, Larry Ellison, the studio chief’s father, invested $1 billion in Musk’s takeover of Twitter, now X.
What SpaceX, the owner of X, would get out of a deal with the studio is less obvious, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The publication mentions X’s advertising business as one possibility. Another would be selling part of the spectrum held by local CBS stations. Whether SpaceX ultimately leases anything close to the number of towers it wants is uncertain, according to analyst Laurent Yoon of the investment firm Bernstein. In his view, the competitive impact on mobile operators may still be years away.
Malone named the studio’s competitor in the keynote address named after him, which, according to the programme, he delivered remotely at the Paley Center summit in New York on 21 October. Larry Ellison, he said, will have to combine a social network with content and with streaming in order to try to keep pace with YouTube, Google and AI. In the same address, he said that YouTube is leading in media.
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