Rolfe Winkler

SpaceX’s satellite-internet division has outpaced rivals and generated surging revenue, but it hasn't lived up to Elon Musk’s ambitions. Starlink reported $1.4 billion in revenue for 2022—up from $222 million in 2021. However, the company had predicted the business would be bigger by now: a 2015 presentation SpaceX used to raise money from investors projected that Starlink would generate almost $12 billion in revenue and $7 billion in operating profit in 2022. Starlink is key for Musk's plans to send humans to Mars. Global spending on high-speed internet is orders of magnitude bigger than o

Financial reports and interviews with former SpaceX employees depict robust growth in new rocket-launch contracts and a thin bottom line that is vulnerable when things go awry. They also show the company putting steep revenue expectations on a nascent satellite-internet business it hopes will eventually dwarf the rocket division and help finance its goal of manned missions to Mars. SpaceX projected the satellite-internet business would have over 40 million subscribers and bring in more than $30 billion in revenue by 2025, according to the documents. The internet service is currently in planning stages without a factory or a full-fledged team of engineers.

President-elect Donald Trump struck a conciliatory tone at the start of a high-profile meeting with top tech executives Dec 14, telling the Silicon Valley leaders that his goal is “to help you folks do well.” “We want you to keep going with the incredible innovation... Anything we can do to help this go along we’re going to be there for you,” he told the tech executives. “You call my people, you call me. It doesn’t make any difference.” President-elect Trump also told the executives that he would “do fair-trade deals” and said he was “going to make it a lot easier for you to trade across borders.” Trump has been a persistent critic of past trade deals, including the pending Trans Pacific Partnership.

At the meeting, Trump was flanked by Vice President-elect Mike Pence and billionaire investor Peter Thiel, who is advising the president-elect. Tech executives present included Alphabet Chief Executive Larry Page, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. About a dozen executives were scheduled to attend the meeting. The attendee list is a Who’s Who of tech, including Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk, and chairman of Google parent Alphabet Eric Schmidt, apparently.

Now as one of the tech industry’s main bridges to President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration, Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel is playing a central role in helping shape the relationship with a president most tech titans didn’t want.

Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur Peter Thiel is continuing to put his stamp on the presidential transition with appointments of two associates to help in that effort, according to a person close to the transition effort. Mark Woolway, the Vice President of Corporate Development at health benefits broker Zenefits, and Kevin Harrington, a managing director at Thiel Capital, will join so-called “landing teams” charged with identifying policy priorities and hiring key people into executive-branch departments. Woolway is set to join the landing team at the Treasury Department and Harrington the team at the Commerce Department.

Google wants websites to use encryption, to protect themselves and users from hackers. Unless they are e-commerce sites, in which case Google doesn’t want them to use encryption too widely.

The dissonance arises from the requirements of Google’s “Trusted Stores” program, an effort by the search giant to show users where they can “shop online with confidence.” Here’s the rub: According to e-mails Google sent one merchant, the Trusted Stores program doesn’t play nice with encryption.

Google and three other Silicon Valley companies recently settled a lawsuit alleging that they agreed not to recruit each other’s employees. Maybe Google didn’t need to worry about poaching.

The search giant ranked as the top US employer for compensation and benefits, according to employee ratings compiled by Glassdoor. Facebook ranked third. Overall, 12 tech companies ranked in the top 25.

How much do Google employees make? Glassdoor shared survey results for software engineers at five top tech firms. Those show software engineers at Google have an average base salary of $128,000. Apple software engineers did slightly better, making $132,000. Facebook’s made $120,000 and Microsoft's and Amazon’s made closer to $111,000 and $105,000 respectively. Of course, salary is not those employees’ only compensation: Perks can include stock options or restricted stock, not to mention free lunch.

Advertising may be coming to your thermostat and lots of other strange places, courtesy of Google.

In a December letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the search giant said that it could be serving ads and other content on “refrigerators, car dashboards, thermostats, glasses, and watches, to name just a few possibilities.”

Google made the statement to help justify why it shouldn’t disclose revenue generated from mobile devices, a figure the SEC had requested and that companies like Facebook and Twitter both disclose.

Google argued that it doesn’t make sense to break out mobile revenue since the definition of mobile will “continue to evolve” as more “smart” devices roll out.

“Our expectation is that users will be using our services and viewing our ads on an increasingly wide diversity of devices in the future,” the company said in the filing.

Its name has become a verb meaning "to search," but as users shift to mobile devices, Google is suddenly faced with the threat that its search engine -- and its advertising business -- are becoming less relevant.

The company was built with the help of an army of "spiders" deployed to crawl the Web, and sophisticated algorithms to rank the value of pages. But in the mobile age, those spiders can't easily navigate the apps where users are spending most of their time, threatening Google's roughly $50-billion advertising business.

In response, Google in the fall launched an initiative to better see -- and direct -- what smartphone and tablet users do on their devices. The effort seeks to mimic what Google built on the Web, with an index of the content inside mobile apps and links pointing to that content featured in Google's search results on smartphones.

[March 10]