If you plug eleventy trillion dollars of hope that the aristos can finally replace the working class into the issue, Earth loses access to low orbit from orbital debris almost immediately.
Their entire mindset cannot deal with this. Low orbit is a physically-enforced type of commons, inextricably tied to tragedy if overpopulated. You cannot privatize it and scale indefinitely. There is no defense, and any pissed off individual actor who gets malicious can burn it to the ground.
Chinese mega constellations on higher orbits & their spent stages left in space are a bigger issues.
Still in case it got going & made higher orbits unusable, starlink would likely still work just fine on the lower self-cleaning orbits, not to mention using a partial (and hopefully soon full) RLV for replenishment.
This 1 Trillion Dollar has to be translated to either sending up A LOT of foreign payload OR his payload; All of this payload = new Satelites. Its not like we are sending earth resource up in space to build a dyson sphere.
SpaceX immediately responded by lowering its target orbits by 70km, the maximum it could legally do without renegotiating formally.
When a high orbit develops Kessler Syndrome, the billions of pieces of debris rain down on lower orbits and cause cascading collisions there, and they keep doing it for centuries.
Not understanding how any of this works, the scientists not being capable of convincing the politicos, or the leaders not being able to escape their local maxima of public stances to recognize a real threat, is a massive, civilizational level hubris. This is pass/fail - the math does not care about our level of understanding or maturity.
Stop trying to make Kessler Syndrome a thing. It was never a thing, it won’t be a thing, it will never be a thing.
Every collision increases the chance of additional collisions.
"Weeks"? SpaceX is aiming to be within the guideline of 25 years for the intact spacecraft, with solar panels unfurled. The want at minimum five years of business operations out of it. Half a spacecraft is still going to be decades (if not centuries if they lose the panels), and small chunks of spacecraft years.