“We should save all these quotes now where they're saying, oh, Elon can't be a competitor because he only has 80 megahertz of spectrum. Because then when they want to merge with someone, they're going to claim, oh, no, he's actually a competitor.”
Decoder with Nilay Patel · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026
Nilay Patel asked whether four national wireless carriers is the right number for the US. The telecom analyst says more competition drives innovation, notes margins near 60% in wireless, and predicts the carriers will reverse their argument about SpaceX when it suits them.
Transcript
Well, under Chairman Wheeler, which goes way back, yeah, four was the number. Wheels
and I were buds.
You know, if you called him now, he'd be like, I told you it should have been four and it's going to go back there. Obviously, in the new administration, they didn't believe that that was the case. And I think you see Chairman Carr, you know, pointing to prices, how he sees them being down, and the competition that's happened in fixed wireless. But I think you always want more competition in a market, right? It drives innovation and it lowers prices. And margins are approaching 60% in the wireless business. I can't say we've had a tremendous amount of innovation, which, by the way, gets back to this, what the telcos are doing in the fear, refusing to give them a wholesale agreement. That's their right, right? But at some point, like if the FCC's mandate to act in the public interest, like we have a current administration, who knows who gets in the next administration? If these telcos are going to push back so hard on what the fourth competitor, in this case, SpaceX, is going to do, the FCC can probably get involved in some ways.…
There is nothing funnier than a giant telecom insisting that a thing that is not a competitor is their competitor. They all do it. It's very funny. Last question. Again, this is just the big thing that I've been rattling around my head. We might be on a cusp of an entire paradigm shift in what…
I mean, we think about this every day at Lightshed in terms of all the different ways that AI and how we interact with our information and how we interact with commerce and using agents. And Muse has obviously been something we've been waiting for from someone. And there's going to be other…
The idea of Elon shipping a mid-range Android phone with the Play Store on it is so deeply funny to me. I truly hope it happens because that's the product you can make today. And maybe there's a paradigm shift and there's a different set of products, but right now you need to have Instagram. And…
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