SpaceX wants to be America's fourth phone carrier — tower owners are cashing in

Elon Musk's SpaceX doesn't just want to beam the internet from space. It wants to sell you a phone plan, and the companies that own the cell towers are already cashing in.

SpaceX ( SPCX ) is in talks for access to at least 80,000 US cell sites, Bloomberg reported Thursday , a step toward building a fourth nationwide carrier .

Crown Castle ( CCI ) is up double digits Friday, with American Tower ( AMT ) and SBA Communications ( SBAC ) close behind. AT&T ( T ) and T-Mobile ( TMUS ) are sliding, and Verizon ( VZ ) is lower too.

The biggest tile on that map is SpaceX itself. At about $2 trillion, it's worth roughly three times all six phone and tower companies combined, according to Yahoo Finance calculations.

It's the second time this month the two groups have split this hard. On Oct. 9, SpaceX agreed to pay about $8 billion for a nationwide block of wireless airwaves. Tower stocks jumped, and the carriers sank by double digits that day. Since then, Crown Castle is up 27%, and AT&T is down 14%.

Eighty thousand sites is a big ask. That's about half of the 158,500 cell towers in the US, according to the Wireless Infrastructure Association. American Tower has about 41,000 sites in the US and Canada, and Crown Castle about 40,000.

The landlords' best tenants are the ones getting hurt

AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile bring in about 85% of American Tower's US and Canada revenue. For the tower owners, SpaceX would be a new tenant. For the carriers, it would be a new rival.

The market is pricing that in. The carriers have shed about $21 billion in market value Friday, while the tower stocks have added about $9 billion.

Crown Castle CEO Chris Hillabrant didn't name names on Wednesday's earnings call, but he left the door open. "You can assume that we're talking to all parties," he said.

Nothing is signed yet. The talks are still far from a formal lease deal, and some see them as a bargaining chip in SpaceX's dealings with the carriers. Better satellites could also mean SpaceX needs fewer towers than it's asking for.

The next test comes Tuesday, when American Tower reports earnings. Watch whether management talks up SpaceX as a customer, or whether the rally starts to cool.

Internal AI tools helped analyze interview transcripts, research, and draft this post. Humans reviewed, edited, and fact-checked this post before publication.

Jared Blikre is the global markets and data editor for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on X at @SPYJared or email him at jaredblikre@yahooinc.com.