Taken together, Musk’s concentrated power, political interventions, and overall conduct create a strategic warning. The enthusiasm for Starlink should not make India, or any other nation, to treat this record as irrelevant. More so when Musk has self-recognised himself as George Soros.
Elon Musk has turned an Indian regulatory issue into a heated political confrontation. On 7 October, he accused unnamed Indian oligarchs of blocking Starlink’s entry to preserve their “monopolistic chokehold on the Indian people,” which he called a “crime against the people of India.” He then escalated by naming Mukesh Ambani, and asking, “Is Ambani the real boss of India?” and eventually crossed a red line by posting a message addressed to “Dear Prime Minister Ambani”. When Rahul Gandhi responded, Musk thanked him and called the situation “indeed troubling”.
Musk was not complaining about delay. He was publicly advancing the charge that India’s state authority was subordinate to corporate power, a charge that India’s Congress party makes regularly. He was disparaging the Indian Prime Minister while engaging with India’s Leader of the Opposition over the issue.
While most commentary will focus on Starlink and the controversy surrounding its entry and Musk’s posts, this article applies a four-part framework to Musk himself to expose a sovereign blind spot not just for India, but for other countries too.
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POWER
Musk is not an ordinary investor. He commands extraordinary influence—political, financial and infrastructural. He is the world’s first trillionaire, with extraordinary influence and proximity to the American state. The amount of wealth, control of critical infrastructure, algorithmic and AI power, and political pull concentrated in one man is much more than what any nation-state should be comfortable with.
Starlink’s deployment in the Russia-Ukraine war shows his decisions can have serious geopolitical implications. Early on in the Russia-Ukraine war, thousands of Starlink terminals were gifted to Ukraine, with SpaceX absorbing the cost for the service. In a similar vein, he also allowed Iranians to use Starlink to circumvent the Iranian government’s censorship efforts during the government’s crackdown on its citizens. Though widely praised, these interventions exposed a structural vulnerability of access to critical communications infrastructure through Musk’s discretion, or American state interests.
In 2022, Musk declined a Ukrainian request to activate Starlink coverage near Sevastopol citing fears of nuclear escalation. Let me repeat it; Musk refused to enable a specific offensive. A military decision entirely at his discretion. Later that year, after Musk posted a peace proposal on X, a Ukrainian diplomat told him to “f*** off”. In response, Musk posted about cutting the funding.
The point is not whether he was right or wrong about his reading of the situation or about his proposal. It is about a private individual in a position to dictate war and peace, and the terms thereof.
Starlink may be a great technology, but if its availability depends on its owner’s judgments, outside a state’s chain of command, it makes strategic sense to scrutinise the owner just as much.
This does not mean that India, or any other nation, should be paranoid about Elon Musk. But it would be highly irresponsible to not recognise that he has both the capacity to make consequential decisions unilaterally and the willingness to exercise his power.
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