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Elon Musk's SpaceX wants to be your phone company — and it is now negotiating for the towers to prove it. According to a Bloomberg exclusive reported on Thursday, SpaceX is in talks with cellular infrastructure companies to secure access to at least 80,000 wireless sites across the United States. If the deals close, the rocket company would have the physical backbone of a fourth nationwide mobile carrier — and the stocks of AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile all slipped on the news.
What SpaceX is reportedly negotiating
The talks, described by Bloomberg's sources as being with tower owners including Crown Castle, would give SpaceX access to a huge slice of America's wireless real estate. To grasp the scale: the Wireless Infrastructure Association counts about 158,500 purpose-built cell towers operating in the US, so 80,000 sites would be roughly half the country's tower stock in one move. Crown Castle alone operates around 40,000 US towers; American Tower has about 42,000; privately held Vertical Bridge owns some 18,000.
According to Reuters, which confirmed Bloomberg's reporting, Crown Castle CEO Christian Hillabrant said on Wednesday that the company was talking to "all parties" when asked about potential leases with SpaceX and Amazon — while declining to discuss any specific customer. Crown Castle, American Tower, Vertical Bridge and SpaceX all declined to comment further to Reuters. In other words: this is a negotiation, not a done deal, and everyone involved is staying carefully quiet.
Why towers, why now
The tower talks are the second half of a strategy SpaceX has been assembling in plain sight. The company is already buying nationwide low-band spectrum — the airwaves deal we explained earlier this month — and it runs the world's largest satellite constellation through Starlink, including its Direct to Cell service that beams connectivity to ordinary phones from orbit. Spectrum plus satellites plus towers equals something no previous SpaceX venture has attempted: a genuine terrestrial mobile network to complement the orbital one.
The price tag is sobering. Analysts at TD Cowen estimate that building a nationwide terrestrial network would cost more than $80 billion and take many years, with billions more in ongoing spending. That is real money even for Musk, whose companies are simultaneously pursuing the proposed Tesla-SpaceX merger and a $10.7 billion plan to give Starlink shares to children. Leasing existing towers rather than building new ones is the cheaper path — but "cheaper" here still means one of the most expensive network builds in American history.
What it means for the industry
Wall Street read the report as a threat, not a rumour. Shares of AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile fell between 4.2% and 5% in extended trading on Thursday — a collective verdict that a Musk-backed fourth carrier, armed with satellites for rural coverage and leased towers for cities, could redraw the industry's map. The incumbents' moat has always been their physical networks; SpaceX is now shopping for a shortcut across it.
Still, the distance between talks and towers is long. Leasing 80,000 sites means negotiating with multiple tower giants, securing backhaul and power at each location, and integrating it all with spectrum SpaceX is still acquiring. Regulators will have questions, and the incumbents will not sit still. But the direction of travel is unmistakable: the company that put the internet in orbit now wants the steel on the ground. Whether it becomes America's fourth carrier or just its most ambitious negotiator, the wireless industry just got a new kind of competitor to worry about.