Reuters, that bulwark of journalism, caused a stir on Thursday, February 5, 2026, when it reported that Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite internet firm, was developing a smartphone. It featured several people, kept anonymous in the published piece, who claimed to have inside knowledge of the plans.
The internet chomped onto it like a horse on a sugar-coated apple, only for Musk to refute the rumors mere hours later. Given that Musk himself had mused about a Starlink phone only a week earlier, the go-stop-go-stop rumor mill gave us all whiplash. So what happened?
Starlink Phone? Elon Musk Says No.
Perhaps it was Musk’s tendency to speak vaguely of pie-in-the-sky projects as if they were concrete plans. The Reueters piece wouldn’t be the first time Musk discussed a Starlink phone publicly, but it was the most direct discussion about it that’s made it into the public sphere.
“The plans include making a mobile device connected to its Starlink satellite internet constellation that could rival smartphones, according to three people familiar with the plans,” read the Reuters story.
“Specifics on the device’s design or when Musk plans to develop the product are unclear. Starlink, in recent years, has worked with T-Mobile to bring Starlink internet directly into mobile phones on that network, a different effort than SpaceX producing a phone itself.”
Reuters said in the story that SpaceX didn’t respond to their request for a comment, but by mid-afternoon when the story went live, Musk himself responded on X.com by saying plainly but emphatically, “We are not developing a phone.”
We are not developing a phone
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 5, 2026
Well, then. Only a week earlier, Andrew Côté, founder of Hyperstition, posted on X.com that a “Starlink phone would be so sick.”
Musk swiftly chimed in, saying, “Not out of the question at some point. It would be a very different device from current phones. Optimized purely for running max performance/watt neural nets.”
Given the week’s events, it sounds like it was more of a brainstorm or a daydream than a concrete plan for a Starlink phone, at least in the traditional sense.
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