Iridium’s Niche, Measured Against SpaceX’s Shadow

Monte’s habit is to start from a theme and end on a company, and here the theme is what happens to the incumbents as SpaceX comes public. Iridium runs 66 low-orbit satellites with near-global coverage, and the desk’s case is that it is deliberately stepping back from the crowded direct-to-device and broadband fight — where Starlink, AST SpaceMobile and Amazon’s Kuiper are taking share — and leaning into a narrower niche: two-way IoT data and precision positioning and timing, with a robotics-and-drone tailwind the desk expects to inflect from 2028. A 2027 US drone budget stepping up toward $54bn is the demand it is positioning for.

The other side is concentration risk of a different kind. The US government is about 29% of revenue on a contract up for renewal in late 2026, and SpaceX — vertically integrated from launch to satcom — has just won a multi-billion-dollar Space Force award. Monte’s base case is that the long relationship gets renewed, but it is candid that losing it would reprice the stock hard. On valuation the desk calls IRDM priced for perfection at current multiples and stays on the sidelines, watching for a pullback toward a level it would rather own.

The core idea The real tension is not Iridium versus Starlink head-on — it is whether a focused niche (IoT, positioning, anti-jam, drones) is a durable moat or just the ground SpaceX has not trampled yet. Monte’s answer is a careful one: good business, wrong price for now.

Where it fits

It is the natural companion to the SpaceX-as-compute read we ran from Monte earlier — the same desk, now looking at what the gravity of a trillion-dollar listing does to the smaller names in its orbit. Worth your time if you like a thesis built before the ticker, with the bear case priced rather than waved away.