Charlie Ergen, SpaceX and Trump

Seven years after launching its first Starlink internet satellite, SpaceX is preparing to go public and could command a sky-high valuation. One ironic beneficiary of Starlink’s success is telecom mogul Charlie Ergen, who has used regulatory arbitrage to save his failed broadband bet. This is a tale of dumb industrial policy that might end well despite government planners. The story starts in 2019 when the Trump Justice Department required T-Mobile and Sprint to sell spectrum and their prepaid phone business to Ergen’s Dish network as a condition for green-lighting their merger. The government’s policy goal was to stand up a fourth competitor in the wireless market to Verizon, AT&T, and the new T-Mobile-Sprint. Ergen had earlier spent billions of dollars acquiring spectrum, much of which he hadn’t deployed. The Trump Federal Communications Commission set strict deadlines for him to build out a 5G network to prevent him from warehousing spectrum and later flipping it for a profit, as his critics warned at the time he might try to do. Enter Trump FCC Chair Brendan Carr, who launched a review of Ergen’s compliance with the agency’s build-out requirements. Ergen met with President Trump in June 2025 in an effort to stop the FCC from reclaiming EchoStar’s licenses. President Trump prodded Chairman Carr to let Ergen sell his licenses. Chairman Carr obliged. The overriding public interest here is getting scarce spectrum into the hands of companies that can put it to good use. Populist outcry that business titans are profiting off Washington is overwrought, but it’s on point in Ergen’s case. That’s what happens when politicians and regulators try to manage markets. But the good news is that the private market for spectrum and the second-term Trump FCC may save the day.