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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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A profit maximizing monopolist increases production and lowers prices when their marginal costs decrease, the same as in a competitive market.

Yeah, but how much a monopoly lowers those prices depends on how the elasticity of demand varies with price, and I'm not sure what they can count on there. Over the past few years they've managed to double their number of commercial+government launches in part by being the cheapest option around, but still the majority of their launches are now Starlink. Bezos wants to put most of the Kuiper satellites up on New Glenn, and China's putting the Thousand Sails constellation up on Long March, and all the other satellite constellation plans out there are for tens or maybe hundreds of satellites, not thousands, so there's not a big external market in the wings that they can sweep up.

They can probably keep Starship busy with more internal payloads, which will be great for them, since they've got a more powerful Starlink design waiting on Starship because it's too big for Falcon, but this doesn't affect their prices to others. To have incentive to cut prices they need the cuts to essentially create new markets. New markets would be awesome if they happened, I admit. The first "12 universities design a nanosat and we launch the winner" programs started up shortly after I left undergrad, which was awe inspiring, and at Starship costs we could afford "1000 high schools design a nanosat and we launch the winning 100" instead. But that only scales so far, and most markets with lots of room for growth are very speculative. The one obvious growth market right now is high-bandwidth low-latency communication, but Musk+Bezos+China seem to have that sewn up already.

On the other hand, prices here aren't determined by a spherical monopolist, but by Musk. He actually seems to be serious about the cities-on-Mars thing, and Starlink seems to be lucrative enough to pay for it even if he doesn't maximize profit from other customers, so it wouldn't be completely out of character for him to just lower short-term profit margins speculatively, on the theory that even if the short-run demand elasticity isn't there it's more important to create new markets in the long run.