Deutsche Telekom CEO says SpaceX has a massive mountain to climb to compete in mobile: 'Welcome to the party!'

• Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Höttges is watching SpaceX's Starlink mobile ambitions closely.
• A competitive network would need a land-based presence, and that will cost a lot of money, he said.
• Höttges' larger concern is SpaceX creating a new kind of communication business, as Musk did in autos.

The CEO of one of Europe's largest telecom networks is not stressed about Elon Musk's Starlink mobile ambitions — yet.

"If he has the money, go for it," Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Höttges said during the company's third-quarter earnings call Thursday. "My assessment is that SpaceX, at least, if they want to play in that industry, needs at least minimum €200 billion."

Deutsche Telekom owns a 55% controlling share of T-Mobile US.

Like his US counterparts at AT&T and Verizon, Höttges said that satellite-based networks aren't sufficient for handling the kind of mobile coverage that consumers have grown accustomed to in well-developed areas.

"If you have an antenna 10 meters or 100 meters away from you, why should you go 400 kilometers up and down?" he asked.

The consensus among established carriers is that terrestrial networks — made up of tens of thousands of towers and hundreds of megahertz of spectrum, developed over many years — are the only viable competition to their services.

"Welcome to the party," Höttges said.

Still, even though he believes Starlink faces such massive financial and infrastructural hurdles, Höttges is not taking his eye off Musk.

"SpaceX is creating a new category," he said.

Between the chipsets, data centers, AI platforms, and satellites Musk owns, there's an opportunity to create a new kind of vertically integrated communications company in the next five to ten years, he said. After all, that's one lesson of the Tesla story.

"That is why I'm saying I take that super serious, because I was witnessing what happened to the car industry," Höttges said. "They were ignoring it for too long, and we have to face the situation."