I broadly agree, though I wouldn't call it a Ponzi scheme. Not just because Musk's a bit litigious*, but because a Ponzi scheme is a very specific thing and I think, decades from now, what Musk is doing today will get its own name.

Where I disagree:

> You should be able to do the same thing by pointing dishes at each other long distance and having local nodes broadcast 5g. It would be a hell of a lot cheaper than rocket launches and most telecom companies already do it.

Radio is "line-of-site" at these wavelengths, it doesn't diffract much around the environment. Being 500 km up gives you a clear path to a big patch of ground (and sea), which is why they only needed to get to around 10k units for worldwide coverage.

For scale, Czechia has about 700 microwave links; if this scales up proportionately then just the EU is by itself probably has several times as many links in total as number of birds in the entire Starlink constellation: https://www.racom.eu/eng/case/cetin-leverages-ray-technology

* though that's a good reason all by itself; shame he's not practicing what he preaches about free speech absolutism.