Elon Musk's plan to turn SpaceX into a major threat to the legacy telecom companies is "not a viable strategy," AT&T CEO John Stankey tells me.

🛰️ Catch up quick: Starlink, SpaceX's satellite business, already competes with traditional telecom companies for home and business internet customers — and it's now talking about a mobile business that would put it in more direct competition with wireless carriers.

• "I anticipate us to be able to acquire quite a few of their customers because I think our service will be better," SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said in August on SpaceX's first earnings call after going public.
• 📉 The shot across the bow caused shares to drop the next day for AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile.

Between the lines: To become a true fourth U.S. mobile carrier, SpaceX would need more terrestrial infrastructure to provide the capacity of a traditional cellular network — an expensive endeavor.

• 📡 But SpaceX believes it has a more efficient option: install small cellular base stations alongside Starlink dishes on homes and businesses.
• The ground network could add capacity where satellites alone aren't enough — without requiring SpaceX to build a traditional sprawling network of large cell towers, Musk says.

👎 AT&T's Stankey said the economics and technical aspects of that plan don't line up.

• "It would cost as much to do that as it would to build a macro network to be able to handle those capabilities," he says.
• "There's all kinds of other issues, like you can't radiate cellular signals from somebody's house without their permission, unless somebody changes the law on that. We can go down a whole bunch of reasons why that won't effectively work."

SpaceX reps did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Zoom out: AT&T, meanwhile, is betting on its strategy of deploying fiber infrastructure to boost its internet business at a time when AI is driving booming demand.

• The latest: AT&T announced a $3 billion deal with Corning today to provide materials for its continued buildout, saying fiber is three times faster than satellite.
• 🥊 "Nothing beats it," Stankey says, adding, "satellite, at its best — if everything happens right over the next 10 years" — is "still not going to beat fiber."

The bottom line: The competition between SpaceX and the major telecom companies is heating up.

Go deeper

Smart ring maker Oura delayed an IPO that had been expected to raise up to $2.2 billion, citing "market conditions," Axios' Dan Primack writes.

• 🪟 Why it matters: The IPO window is narrowing. This is the third official postponement this month, while others have informally delayed.

Behind the scenes: Oura basically couldn't get the price it wanted, in part because of market turmoil driven by volatility in bond yields and oil prices, according to a source familiar with the situation.

• Most shares were being sold by insiders, rather than by the company itself, which put a premium on pricing.

🏷️ Follow the money: The offering was around 5x oversubscribed, the source says, but that doesn't mean that prospective investors were willing to buy at the top of Oura's $40–$44 per share range.

⌚️ What we're watching: Oura's IPO had been viewed as a proxy to see whether Wall Street would treat a wearables company like a health-tech company, rather than as a consumer electronics company. That determination will have to wait.

OpenAI's annual recurring revenue is nearing $70 billion, as enterprise sales more than doubled since July, sources familiar with the financials tell Axios' Madison Mills.

• The company's annualized revenue run rate has grown more than 70% since the beginning of Q3, while its business-to-business revenue has more than doubled.

💰 Meanwhile, OpenAI is looking to raise at least $30 billion in a new funding round after pushing back its IPO plans, Bloomberg reports, seeking a valuation of around $1.4 trillion.

• It will have to juggle a lawsuit filed today by a public interest law group over the rogue hacking incident of tech company Hugging Face, Axios' Avery Lotz reports.
• The intrigue: The case tests an increasingly urgent question as AI agents gain power: Who bears legal responsibility when an agent blows past its guardrails and causes real-world harm?

OpenAI also launched dots, its take on the AI assistant and an answer to Meta's Muse.

🤖 Anthropic's IPO prospectus warns investors that its technology could pose "existential risk" to humanity, while also noting nearly $4.6 billion in revenue for 2025 and a $518 billion in future cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations. (Reuters)

🌮 El Pollo Loco is expanding farther beyond its West Coast roots, disclosing plans to launch 15 restaurants in the New York area over the next five years. (CNBC)