Understanding Starlink’s Dutch Financial Statement
- Quilty Space Editorial Board
- Jul 15
- 2 min read
Updated: Jul 23
July 15, 2025 - Written by Quilty Space
News broke July 10 that a SpaceX Starlink subsidiary called Starlink Satellite Services Corp. (SSSC) submitted an annual financial report in the Netherlands, providing a rare glimpse at the inner workings of the world’s largest satellite constellation.
The numbers were surprising: $2.7B in 2024 revenue, up from $1.4B in 2023, and a net income of $72.7M for 2024, up from a loss of $30.7M the year prior. At face value, they suggest Starlink makes far less than we at Quilty, and other analysts like Mach33 and Payload project. So much less, that Starlink would no longer be considered SpaceX’s biggest moneymaker compared to launch.
Starlink 2024 revenue estimate | |
Quilty Space | $7.8B |
Payload Research | $8.1B |
Mach33/Ark Invest | $6.9B (including Starshield) |
Is SSSC a true assessment of Starlink’s financial performance? Did Starlink only generate about half the revenue of rival Viasat ($4.5B) or moderately more than GEO and MEO giant SES ($2.3B) in 2024? At Quilty, we believe the Dutch financial document provides only a partial view of Starlink’s financial performance, resulting in an incomplete picture.
The first clue is SSSC’s regional revenue breakdown, which places Europe as its largest market and North America fourth, despite the U.S. being Starlink’s largest base of consumer subscribers. For North America to rank so low, SSSC would likely only count Canada (and possibly Mexico). Canada had roughly 400,000 subscribers in 2024. The Quilty Space Starlink model estimates Starlink’s 2024 global consumer revenue at $4.9B, of which $2.7B came from the U.S. market and its then-1.5 million subscribers.
The second clue is the company headcount: 14 people. SpaceX has more than 13,000 employees, of which roughly 3,000 work for Starlink. SSSC doesn’t remotely reflect Starlink’s true employee base.
Third, SSSC focuses on consumer and enterprise customers, but does not appear to count government revenue, especially Starshield and other U.S. military work. NRO’s $1.8B satellite constellation is notably absent. Starlink also pulled in 97% of proliferated LEO task orders under Space Systems Command’s pLEO IDIQ as of late 2024 (the contract vehicle has a ceiling of $13 billion, giving Starlink even more room to grow in 2025). That too, appears missing in the SSSC filing.
In conclusion, SSSC is a holding company created for legal and tax purposes that doesn’t tell us much about Starlink’s underlying financials. Forget revenues and margins, the big takeaway from the SSSC filing is that Starlink itself is presented essentially as an asset-light holding company. The real assets (i.e., the satellites, associated factories, gateways, and user terminals) remain on SpaceX's books. That decision has implications for the value ascribed to Starlink in an IPO scenario, and says a lot about where Elon Musk seeks to accrue value between his space enterprises.