Why I no longer believe in AST SpaceMobile

I owned AST SpaceMobile. A meaningful position. I sold it.

Not because I had made enough money. Not because I needed the cash. Because one morning I woke up and asked myself the question I had been quietly avoiding for too long. What does this company actually do that nobody else can?

I got no answer. Not from myself, not from Reddit, not from Twitter, not from the people who believe in it with religious certainty. Plenty of patents. Plenty of schematic drawings. Plenty of "look how big this phased array is." But no convincing answer to the most fundamental question an investor should ask.

A company built to save the old world

AST SpaceMobile exists because telcos feel threatened by Starlink. That's the whole pitch. Nothing more, nothing less. The future relevance of AT&T, Verizon and Vodafone depends on the idea that they need their own answer to direct-to-cell satellite connectivity, or they get commoditized.

ASTS positions itself as the neutral partner for those telcos. Their spectrum, their customer, their brand. Just with a rocket attached.

That sounds fine until you look at it longer. Because what it really is, is one last gasp from a sector that doesn't want to make the jump to the next era. Telcos have spent a hundred years operating from the same mindset. Own the spectrum, own the network, own the customer, charge premiums for connectivity. And now that someone shows up saying "we'll just beam this from space to every phone, without your middle layer," they panic and start hunting for anything that keeps their model alive.

ASTS sells that rescue plan. That's not progress. That's regression with more satellites.

Meanwhile Elon and Starlink are just skipping a few steps. No middle layer, no partnerships with sectors that are already obsolete, no 45 MOUs with telcos. Straight to the end user, own spectrum, own network, own pace. That's the future the old world refuses to see. ASTS is the exact opposite. It's a company that pushes the old world deeper into its comfort zone.

Elon has a point about the space junk

Here's something a lot of ASTS bulls won't want to hear. Elon is right about the satellites.

An ASTS BlueBird is not a normal satellite. It's an unfolding phased array of 64 square meters, with plans for 223 square meters in Block 2. In practice it's a mirror the size of a townhouse, sitting in low Earth orbit. Astronomers are already complaining openly about the brightness. BlueBird satellites have become some of the brightest objects in the night sky. Astronomical observations are being actively disrupted.

Imagine what happens when they launch a constellation of 168 of these things. And then one day, one of them stops working. You're not left with a useful traffic tower in the sky. You're left with a massive reflective chunk of debris at an altitude where Kessler-syndrome risks have been climbing for years.

Starlink has this problem too, but to a lesser degree per satellite. ASTS does it in the most brute way possible. As big as possible, as visible as possible, as much drag as possible. If you think about who you'd want stewarding low Earth orbit for the next generation, ASTS is not your friend.

It's, fairly literally, a thorn in the eye of anyone who looks up.

Execution is failing

A pre-revenue company with a market cap of nearly $30 billion has one job. Deliver. Make the launches. Get satellites into orbit. Activate customers. Generate revenue.

Their last launch failed. That's not a detail. That's a warning. SpaceX has spent years blowing up rockets while iterating, sure, but that was during R&D on their own vehicle. ASTS was using someone else's rocket and they still managed to mess it up. That says something about operational discipline, not about the physics of rocketry.

And right after that failure they came running to Elon. To SpaceX. The launch arm of the exact party that is their biggest competitor in direct-to-cell. There's reasonable logic behind it (there is no other affordable ride to orbit at scale), but the signal to the outside world is embarrassing. Without the party trying to defeat us we cannot even get our constellation into orbit.

With all the money this company has raised, with all the attention it gets, with all the optimism from its investors, they still cannot reliably put a handful of satellites into space. That's not a detail. That's a pattern.

The moat is thin, if it exists at all

What is their moat?

Better technology than SpaceX? No.
Better leadership than Elon? No.
More money than Starlink? Not even close.
Better execution? Demonstrably not.
Patents? Maybe. But patents are a rear-guard fight, not a head start. And Starlink has the legal team and the cash to either grind through patent litigation for years or design around it.

What's left is the telco relationship. That's the real moat, if there is one. But even there, there's a hollowness. Telcos are not loyal. Telcos are pragmatic. The moment Starlink offers an attractive deal to AT&T (the way they already have with T-Mobile), AT&T will fold. Because telcos have no ideological preference for "neutrality." They have a preference for margin and market share.

The moat, in other words, is a rental agreement on a few important partners. Rental agreements expire.

What it actually is

What AST SpaceMobile actually is, I think, is a meme stock with rockets. A company that tells a good story to a type of investor who has no technical depth but a sensitive ear for "next big thing in space." The stock price swings around based on news fragments nobody really understands. A patent, an MOU with a telco, a launch, a Reddit thread. There is no underlying value creation you can track. You cannot read the chart because there is no signal under it.

And that is exactly the kind of stock you should not touch. Not because it can't double, but because you have no idea why it would double, and no idea why it would halve. You are a passenger in a story whose plot you don't understand.

The most likely outcome

My best guess. ASTS does not go to zero in one catastrophic event. ASTS goes to zero through slow erosion. Cash burns down while Block 2 slips. Telcos, one by one, begin signing parallel deals with Starlink. Shares get issued to fund the constellation, and existing shareholders are diluted to tears. And one day it gets acquired for a fraction of the current market cap by a telco consortium that wants the assets for cheap.

That's not a meme. That's how it actually ends for companies that have a decent idea in a market where a stronger player with more money, more talent and more momentum decides this segment is theirs too.

Closing

I don't think AST SpaceMobile has no right to exist. They can exist. They're not bad people. They're attempting something ambitious. I wish them well on a personal level.

But if I'm honest about what I see, I see a company operating in the old world, annoying that old world with ways of working that no longer fit, and at the same time cluttering low Earth orbit with mirrors nobody finds beautiful. For a company like SpaceX, or Starlink, ASTS doesn't feel like an honest competitor. It feels more like an obstacle you'd rather just remove. A growth on the system you're trying to build.

As an investor, I don't have to applaud courage. I don't have to root for the underdog. I have to allocate capital where the return is most likely. And when I look at this company and this price tag, I see a story that doesn't match reality.

Starlink can do this. Starlink is doing this. Starlink has more rockets, more money, more talent and more momentum. The question isn't whether ASTS will ever beat Starlink. The question is whether there's a corner of the market Starlink doesn't simply push them out of.

I don't think there is. And a $30 billion market cap for "no" isn't a bargain. It's a mistake.

Disclosure: I held a meaningful position in AST SpaceMobile and have since sold most of it. This is not investment advice. It's an honest account from someone who sat with it for a while, wrestled with it, and stepped out.

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