Elon Musk's Ego Muddies Ukraine's War Efforts Against Russia
“Elon's gonna Elon.” That was the view of one US official in the Washington Post, describing Elon Musk's threat to cut financial support for his satellite communications service Starlink to Ukraine without more Pentagon aid.
That Musk appears to have already changed his mind and will keep the funds flowing suggests there's something to this characterization. His erratic, mercurial online persona is impossible to separate from his businesses, as his frazzled stockholders know first-hand. At his level of wealth — around $200 billion — Musk may find all this thoroughly entertaining. If he keeps a diary, the entry for the last month might read something like: “Tried and failed to get out of a $44 billion deal; annoyed governments with a peace plan for Russia and Taiwan; had a word with Kanye West about his anti-Semitic outburst.”
But the Starlink-Ukraine episode has implications that should keep policymakers up at night. We are opening a wartime chapter in the Musk story with new risks to go with it. “If I were a policymaker… I would be very concerned,” says Richard Tedlow, author of Giants of Enterprise: Seven Business Innovators and the Empires They Built.
Musk and his rivals are involved in a billionaires' space race that combines the dream of a common good with the reality of geopolitics. Musk's Starlink and Jeff Bezos's Project Kuiper want to launch swathes of low-orbiting satellites to bring more of the world online. Demand for faster and more powerful telecommunications won't just be from consumers but from the military, as contracts show. Satellites have a Star Trek side and a Star Wars side.
Starlink has been a good-news story for both Musk and the US defense sector so far. Ukrainians need communications that the
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