Elon Musk built a second internet above the first one. Nobody asked him to. Thousands of satellites orbit at 550 kilometers. Moving at 25 times the speed of sound. Talking to each other through lasers in the vacuum of space. Musk: “Thousands of satellites providing low latency, high-speed internet throughout the world.” Before Starlink, satellite internet lived at 36,000 kilometers. Geostationary orbit. Signals traveling a tenth of the way to the moon before bouncing back. The lag made it barely functional. Musk dropped the altitude by 98%. One decision rewrote the physics of an entire industry. But the altitude wasn’t the real play. Musk: “There are laser links between the satellites. It forms a laser mesh. The satellites can communicate between each other and provide connectivity even if the cables are cut.” Every internet connection you’ve ever used runs through cables. Fiber optic lines buried in soil. Dragged across ocean floors. Threaded through chokepoints that every military maps before anything else. A single anchor drop can black out a country. An earthquake can sever a continent. The entire digital world hangs from threads in the mud. Musk built a network that doesn’t touch the ground. No cables. No trenches. No ocean floor. No single point of failure. A constellation of machines whispering to each other through light at the edge of the atmosphere. The men who tried before him weren’t fools. Gates backed Teledesic at the height of Microsoft’s power. Motorola built Iridium with the best engineers alive. Both paid someone else to reach orbit. Both went to zero. Musk owned the rocket. SpaceX made launch reusable. Built the satellites in-house. Flew them on its own rockets. Owned every inch of the chain from factory floor to orbit. That isn’t a cost advantage. It’s a moat no one can cross without first building a rocket company from scratch. Starlink passed 10 million subscribers as a side project. Every telecom executive on Earth watched it happen. Not one of them can explain the architecture underneath. They think he built a better satellite company. He built the only network that survives when the ground gives out. And the ground always gives out.