Starlink is truly impressive, but their cloud business is even more impressive. A less than one year payback on their cloud investments (per CFO comments below) implies ROIC at high levels (>60% after tax). On Amazon's call Jassy quoted paybacks on their server/network investments of less than three years (25-30%+ ROIC after tax). The SpaceX numbers are insanely good. Having worked in the oil and gas business, am used to seeing paybacks on major projects (offshore development) of a decade or more. They should be plowing capital into their cloud business and it appears they are. Truck loads of NVDA chips will be needed of course.

Bret Johnsen
CFO & Secretary

"Looking ahead, we continue to see robust demand in all 3 of our business segments, but in particular, in our cloud services arrangements. We see increasingly favorable economics with each agreement we signed. And as Elon mentioned, we expect the supply-demand imbalance in the compute market to continue. The current economics have translated into a less than 1 year payback on our new capital deployments for compute. For example, in the first few weeks of the third quarter, we've already contracted an additional $6.7 billion of cloud services revenue over a 6-month period that begins ramping starting in October of this year. We believe this puts us on a trajectory, including contribution from Cursor, to reach $100 billion of ARR or annualized revenue run rate by the end of this year based on our expected revenue in the month of December of this year."

seekingalpha.com - Space exploration technologies corp spcx q2 earnings call transcript