Just 18 months ago, US satellite TV company EchoStar was on the verge of a messy bankruptcy. Now, it is literally riding a rocket ship. On Monday, EchoStar agreed to sell $17bn of mobile phone spectrum to Elon Musk’s aerospace company SpaceX, with half the payment in SpaceX’s unlisted shares. A once shaky investment just became an unlikely way for regular investors to bet on Musk’s interstellar ambitions.
EchoStar, founded by telecoms wildcatter Charlie Ergen, had only recently dumped another large chunk of spectrum via a sale to telecoms company AT&T. That reflected Ergen’s realisation that there was little point trying to take on the giant US operators, who have been more adept at creating large-scale mobile offerings. Capitulation has proved incredibly profitable: at $23bn, EchoStar’s market capitalisation has nearly tripled in two weeks and its tens of billions of dollars in once-distressed debt now trades around face value.
The politics of the deal aren’t simple: it will require the sign-off of the US Federal Communications Commission. That agency chastised EchoStar earlier this year for being tardy in turning its $40bn of spectrum purchases, amassed over decades, into a viable mobile network. Back then, Musk was a close ally of the White House, something that no longer looks to be the case.