Can anyone out there explain how merging two companies that have never made a dime and between them have burned about $8 billion does anything except insure 1 bankruptcy instead of 2? 

you mean like Lucent and Alcatel? sure, for xm and siri is a little different, I had a position in Siri but got out after about 6 months for a very small profit.

The fact that satelites cost $$$ to make, launch (look that up you find $$$) and then to manage satelite orbit (look that up too! $$$$) find it in annual reports.

moving on siri Satelites are old and are probably starting to faili at this point. Satelites have a 15 year life span. Siri had some problems and one of the sats went through a meteor shower damaging the satelite and reduced its expectancy down to 5 years.

All the way around the satelite basically loses channels and weaker signal in which the company can broadcast on. The other added cost is buying channels from other companies satelite which is even more expensive.

XM put up two sats within the last couple of years and a very large expense. But they sats are new and in orbit. I believe that XM had 7 sats in orbit put up at a rate of 1 per year. double check on the health and condition of the sats to be sure. because i gave up when I sold siri.

The other expense, So they say was advertising and intorductory offers to compete with each other for customers (which was an outrageous number) and compete for content like the ever so precious Howey Stern and what a friend of mine calls REDNECK NASCAR plus all the other content.

When I had Siri they were do the deal with Howey Baby and gave him something like 1.2 million a year and 1.5 million shares of siri (at the time it was around $4 a share) so it was just basically out of control for what sat radio is. probably still is.

Merging the two (since no one else is doing it) I think like i said I don't keep up with that there fancy gizmo stuff no mor. LOL  anyway Merging the two would wipe out all that crap so they could actually maybe possibly long shot in might be a pipe dream turn a profit some time in this century.

who knows but that is the basic take that I have on the whole ordeal. personally I have better place to put my money. Peace.

Sat radio is also new.  It is just starting to come out as a standard option on many new cars.