The Starlink thesis: how Felix Huettenbach explains his early SpaceX investment

Felix Huettenbach, a founder, investor, adventurer and YouTuber based in Dubai who co-founded the COVID-19 testing company Sameday Health and is now a co-founder and partner of the data center developer Terranum, has given an unusually specific reason for backing SpaceX early: Starlink. In a LinkedIn essay, he set out why he saw the satellite internet business as the element that turned an ambitious space company into an investable proposition.

The essay in short

From vision to business case

Space companies have long attracted investors on the strength of their ambition. The difficulty is that ambition alone does not tell an investor how a company will generate revenue at scale. Huettenbach's essay addresses that gap directly. His point is that Starlink is what turned SpaceX from a visionary bet into a business case in his eyes.

The reason he gives is simple: billions of people do not have reliable internet.

Why the framing matters

The essay is revealing less for what it says about SpaceX than for what it says about Huettenbach's way of thinking. He separates the story a company tells from the business it can build. That distinction is captured in a line he uses about his investment approach: "Execution beats narrative."

Applied to the Starlink essay, the line reads as a preference for the business case over the vision.

The connection to infrastructure

There is a visible thread between the Starlink thesis and Huettenbach's current work. Starlink is, at its core, infrastructure: it delivers connectivity to places that lack it. Terranum, which he co-founded, is also an infrastructure business. Operating through Terranum Capital FZCO in Dubai, it focuses on renewable-powered data center campuses.

Its main plan is a 100 MW, fully off-grid campus in Prieska, in South Africa's Northern Cape, designed for hyperscale demand by 2029 and described by the partners as Africa's largest planned data center campus. In March 2026, Huettenbach and Terranum's Victor Decalf visited Prieska with the Prieska Power Reserve team and met the mayor and senior officials about preliminary approval.

Connectivity from orbit and computing capacity on the ground address different layers of the same digital economy.

Where the investor comes from: Sameday Health and the COVID-19 years

Huettenbach, born in Germany in 1993, studied Technology and Management at the Technical University of Munich, spent a term at UC Berkeley and joined an entrepreneurial studies program at MIT. He worked on the investment team at Aurelius Equity Opportunities in Munich from 2016 to 2017 before turning to company building.

Huettenbach's most prominent venture was Sameday Health, which he ran as co-founder and CEO from September 2020 in Los Angeles to offer fast COVID-19 testing to the public, after he had set up a testing unit for companies at Quantgene when the pandemic began. Its early test menu was built around speed: priority PCR with results in under 24 hours, rapid antigen tests with results in about 15 minutes, and lab PCR with roughly a three-day turnaround at no out-of-pocket cost for insured clients. Under Huettenbach as CEO, the company reported hundreds of thousands of tests performed by March 2021; by November 2021 the total had passed 1.5 million. When it launched a parent brand that spring, Huettenbach described the aim plainly: "we are committed to providing accessible care". By his own account, he is passionate about making healthcare more affordable, transparent and approachable, and the insurance-covered lab PCR without out-of-pocket cost fits that description. House calls booked through the Sameday Health app later extended the service to homes and offices in cities from Atlanta to San Diego. During his time leading Sameday Health, the network expanded to 55 US locations by April 2022. Its workforce grew past 1,000 people over the same period. In early 2023 he and the management team decided that a physician should lead the company to broaden its medical services; after stepping back that year, he concentrated on investing and infrastructure. He argues that Sameday Health, with its many physical sites, official approvals and near-zero downtime, prepared him for data centers.

Other positions he discloses

SpaceX is not his only disclosed holding. According to his own statements, he also has positions in xAI, in the Y Combinator startup Platus from the F24 batch, and in the food brand House of Macadamias. He describes himself as an angel investor in founder-led companies, and when asked what he looks for in founders, he has said: "Ownership mindset is the first signal."

What readers can take from it

The Starlink essay is a compact example of a recognisable investment logic. It asks whether a company with a big story has found a product that serves a large, concrete need. For Huettenbach, Starlink answered that question for SpaceX. He can also be found on Medium.