TechPulse USA

By TechPulse USA | 24 October 2026 On Saturday morning, Ukraine finally got the number it had been waiting for. Not a promise, not an assurance relayed through a third party, and not another claim that the problem was already fixed. A number, read off a monitoring system, by the country's defence minister, to reporters: over 400 kilometres per hour, and stable. That is the whole story and, in a way, it is not the story at all. Because the speed is back, and nobody in a position to explain the past eleven days will say who took it away in the first place. Ukraine's defence minister, Evhenii Khmara, told reporters on Saturday 24 October that Starlink and Starshield — the civilian satellite system and its military version, both operated by Elon Musk's SpaceX — were operating again at speeds over 400 kph after more than a week of restrictions. "The Ministry of Defence's monitoring systems are recording a return to normal speed for Starlink/Starshield. We are record...

SpaceX wants access to 80,000 US cell sites — half of all purpose-built towers in America. Image: TechPulse USA FOURTH CARRIER SpaceX 80,000 Towers 2026: Musk's 4th-Carrier Strike on AT&T Elon Musk is shopping for 80,000 cell towers to turn Starlink Mobile into America's fourth wireless carrier. Tower stocks soared, AT&T sank — and the plan has one giant catch. Published October 24, 2026 · By Daniel Rao, TechPulse USA Elon Musk's war on your phone bill just went from orbit to the ground. On Thursday, Bloomberg reported that SpaceX is in talks with cellular infrastructure companies to secure access to at least 80,000 cell sites across the United States — a move that, according to people familiar with the discussions, would solidify the company's path toward becoming a fourth nationwide wireless carrier , standing shoulder to shoulder with AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. Wall Street's reaction told the story instantly. Within hours, AT&T, Verizo...

Palantir Says NATO War AI Has No Kill Switch — Not Even for Washington By Daniel Rao | October 22, 2026 One AI company is begging California to force kill switches into its own products. Another just told Europe that its battlefield AI has no kill switch at all — and that not even the United States government could flip one if it wanted to. The split screen could hardly be sharper: Silicon Valley's most famous lab wants regulators to build in the off-ramp, while the company wiring AI into NATO's war rooms insists there is no off-ramp to build. The second claim landed Wednesday in Brussels. Louis Mosley, Palantir's executive vice president for the UK and Europe, sat down with Reuters in the alliance's capital and delivered what he called "categorical reassurance": the Maven Smart System, the AI platform now running inside NATO's military headquarters, cannot be remotely switched off. Not by Palantir. Not by Washington. Not by anyone. "What we have...

By Daniel Rao · Oct 21, 2026 Elon Musk's rocket company just had its best quarter ever — and the money barely came from rockets. SpaceX swung to a $4.4 billion third-quarter profit on $14.58 billion of revenue, blowing past Wall Street's estimates, and the engine behind the beat was an AI business that looks, on closer inspection, almost nothing like an AI lab. It looks like a landlord. One that rents out computing power to the very companies beating it. Revenue jumped 161% from a year earlier and landed comfortably above the $12.72 billion analysts expected, according to LSEG data. The bottom line was the real shock: $4.4 billion of net income against a $1.1 billion loss in the same quarter last year and a $1.57 billion consensus profit. Per-share, it earned 45 cents, outstripping a 13-cent average estimate. That is not a beat. That is a different postal code from the estimates. Photo: Starship igniting during its fifth integrated flight test. The rocket that defines S...

Four Rival Telcos Sign Pact to Dethrone Starlink By Daniel Rao, New York — with reporting by the TechPulse USA newsroom Four of Europe's fiercest telecom rivals just shook hands on the one thing they have never agreed on: how to survive Elon Musk. On Monday, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica and Vodafone signed a letter of intent to explore a joint bid for Europe's mobile satellite spectrum — the opening move in building a homegrown alternative to Starlink. If the phrase "European telecom cooperation" sounds like a contradiction, that is exactly why this matters. The four giants, which compete tooth and nail from Berlin to Madrid to Paris, are proposing to pool their bids for the 2GHz satellite airwaves the European Commission will reallocate next year. Their pitch, carried in an identical joint statement on Monday, is to build a European-run direct-to-device (D2D) satellite service — phone-to-satellite connectivity with no dish, no dongle, just your ordinary h...

Update, Oct. 20: Europe's telcos just answered — with a pact The European answer to Puzder's threat did not come from Brussels — it came from the boardrooms. On Monday, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica and Vodafone signed a letter of intent to pursue Europe's 2GHz direct-to-device spectrum jointly, as wholesale partners, without building their own constellation (joint statement via Telefónica and Orange newsrooms, 19 Oct; reported by Light Reading and Mobile World Live). It is the first organised European counter-move in the dispute this post describes: sovereignty by commercial coalition rather than by regulation. Note the caution from our sister coverage: the carriers' letter never names Starlink as a target — the "rival to Starlink" reading is the press's, not the letter's language. The sequel arrived within 24 hours: four European telcos signed a pact to build a homegrown satellite-to-phone alternative and bid for the very 2GHz band Brussels ...

A train of Starlink satellites passing over Tübingen, Germany, in April 2020. Ukraine’s military now depends on the same constellation for its battlefield communications. Photo: Dktue / Wikimedia Commons (CC0). It was the confession nobody in Brussels wanted to make, and Kaja Kallas made it anyway. Standing outside the European Council building on Friday morning, with Volodymyr Zelensky about to walk through the door, Europe’s foreign policy chief said the thing that cuts straight through four years of strategic-autonomy speeches: Europe cannot free Ukraine from Elon Musk’s Starlink. Not now. Not soon. And certainly not on the war’s timetable. The sentence landed harder because of where it was said. The European Council — 27 heads of state and government — had gathered in Brussels for two days of talks with Ukraine and Europe’s own security and defence at the top of the agenda. Zelensky joined the leaders on Friday morning to brief them on the battlefield. And the first thing t...