Wow, this may be the most exciting capital game of the year. Musk bought T-Mobile's spectrum for $8 billion, turning to threaten the entire US telecommunications industry, while the three major telecommunications giants evaporated $36 billion! SpaceX just announced the acquisition of a batch of wireless spectrum, and the three major telecommunications giants in the United States, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon, were collectively sold off by Wall Street, evaporating a total market value of about $36 billion. Among them, T-Mobile plummeted 13.3% in a single day, and Musk has not even started to aggressively grab their customers. The most exciting part of the story is the middleman Grain Management. In August, T-Mobile sold this batch of 800MHz spectrum to Grain in exchange for $2.9 billion in cash and another batch of 600MHz spectrum. In just two months, Grain was reportedly sold to SpaceX for approximately $8 billion. Although T-Mobile needs to sell spectrum due to regulatory conditions and retains some future revenue sharing rights, this transaction is still full of irony: the assets it once owned have been turned into weapons for competitors to attack its own market. Why is Musk willing to offer $8 billion? Because the 800MHz low-frequency signal has a long propagation distance and strong wall penetration ability, it can compensate for Starlink's shortcomings in urban and indoor coverage. Once the satellite network and ground communication network are connected in the future, Starlink has the opportunity to upgrade from supplementing signals for traditional operators to directly charging consumers monthly mobile phone rental fees. SpaceX spent $8 billion to buy the opportunity to enter the mobile communication market in the future, but Wall Street immediately discounted the future cash flow of the three major operators. The most valuable asset for traditional telecom operators is the monthly phone bills paid by tens of millions of users. If Musk can snatch away some users in the future, or force operators to lower prices and increase network investment, even if only a small change in long-term profit expectations, coupled with the huge user base, the valuation may shrink by tens of billions of dollars. This reminds me of the classic capitalist irony: capitalists are willing to sell even the ropes that hang them, as long as the price is right. Grain earns money from spectrum trading, Musk is betting on communication revenue for the next few decades, while the three major operators have paid the market value price in advance. Mantis catches cicadas, followed by yellow sparrows.