A new Wall Street note lays out how Elon Musk could swallow a carrier whole.
Jun 26, 2026 5:03 PM EDT
By Tobi Opeyemi Amure
Markets, Technology, Personal Finance Journalist
Excerpts:
Every industry runs on a comfortable order, right up until someone from outside decides the rules do not apply to them.
In US wireless, that order has held for a long time. Three companies, Verizon (VZ), AT&T (T) and T-Mobile (TMUS), control almost every phone in your pocket. They build the towers, they set the prices, and they have watched a long line of challengers run out of money trying to catch them.
The barriers are brutal. A new carrier needs spectrum, towers, stores and decades of customer trust, which is why your monthly bill rarely falls and your options rarely change.
That math has protected the incumbents for years, and they had grown used to fighting only one another. So the threat that finally rattled all three of them was never going to be another wireless company. It came from a business better known for landing rockets than for selling phone plans.
SpaceX (SPCX), the satellite and launch giant Elon Musk just took public in a record initial public offering, could buy T-Mobile outright to force its way into wireless, according to TD Cowen.
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That one line in a Wall Street research note did what the big three had spent years trying to avoid. It put a price tag on their fear.
The analyst case for a SpaceX takeover of T-Mobile:
TD Cowen analyst Gregory Williams laid out the scenario in a note to clients. T-Mobile “seems to us the clear choice” for a SpaceX wireless push, Stocktwits reports, if the rocket maker cannot strike a network-sharing deal or simply wants to own a carrier outright.
The logic is blunt. SpaceX wants Starlink to grow from a satellite internet service into a full connectivity platform, one that blends space-based and ground-based coverage, and that ambition needs terrestrial network capacity it does not own.
https://www.thestreet.com/technology/spacex-just-put-every-us-carrier-on-notice
