Is Elon Musk Too Powerful?

The level of power Elon Musk wields as owner of SpaceX, Tesla and X is under newfound scrutiny after recent revelations in Isaacson biography.

Elon Musk attends the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center. Photo by Chesnot/Getty Images.

Last week, an excerpt of Walter Isaacson’s new biography, Elon Musk, made a serious charge: that in 2022 Musk had disabled Starlink—the satellite internet service run by Musk’s SpaceX—during a Ukrainian attack on Russia, thus sabotaging Ukraine’s military.

As CNN reported:

Elon Musk secretly ordered his engineers to turn off his company’s Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last year to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet, according to an excerpt adapted from Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the eccentric billionaire titled “Elon Musk.”

Elon Musk, however, disputed this version of events, posting on X:

The Starlink regions in question were not activated. SpaceX did not deactivate anything.

Walter Isaacson scurried to confirm Musk’s version of events, despite his earlier account, writing:

To clarify on the Starlink issue: the Ukrainians THOUGHT coverage was enabled all the way to Crimea, but it was not. They asked Musk to enable it for their drone sub attack on the Russian fleet. Musk did not enable it, because he thought, probably correctly, that would cause a major war.

The Washington Post, which had published the initial excerpt, issued a correction, saying Isaacson “learned that his book mischaracterized the attempted attack by Ukrainian drones on the Russian fleet in Crimea,” and it published a revised “adapted” version of the story:

What the Ukrainians did not know was that Musk decided not to enable Starlink coverage of the Crimean coast. When the Ukrainian military learned that Starlink would not allow a successful attack, Musk got frantic calls and texts asking him to turn the coverage on.

Isaacson’s book, which was released on Tuesday, reportedly contains the original version, but will be “corrected” for future printings. 

There are serious questions about how such a respected biographer could make such a monumental error and how this could slip through what one presumes is a tight vetting and fact-checking process for such a high-profile book.

Regardless of the version of events though, the end result was the same: Elon Musk made the unilateral decision not to allow Ukraine to use his technology to wage a drone attack on Russian forces. 

This raises an important question, as Musk himself expressed to Isaacson:

“How am I in this war?”

Indeed.

Musk justified not allowing Starlink to power Ukraine’s sneak attack on grounds that “then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.” In fact, according to Isaacson, Musk was convinced by Russia’s Ambassador to the U.S. that such an attack by Ukraine would result in a nuclear attack response, likening it to “a mini-Pearl Harbor.”

Apart from being dead wrong on the danger of nuclear escalation (after all, Ukraine has since launched drone attacks on Moscow with no nuclear response), this account raises yet another important question: What was Musk, a private U.S. citizen, doing talking directly with the Russian Ambassador about military responses?

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov underscored the direct consequences, in terms of lives lost, of Musk’s unilateral decision to disallow the attack. In a post on X, Fedorov openly blasted Musk:

By not allowing Ukrainian drones to destroy part of the Russian military (!) fleet via #Starlink interference, @elonmusk allowed this fleet to fire Kalibr missiles at Ukrainian cities. As a result, civilians, children are being killed. This is the price of a cocktail of ignorance and big ego. 

How is an unelected, civilian billionaire who owns a private spacecraft manufacturing and satellite communications company, not to mention the “global town square” once known as Twitter and his significant foreign and domestic interests in Tesla Motors, even in a position to make such geo-political life or death decisions?

Or as one anecdote from a recent New Yorker article put it:

When Elon Musk reportedly spoke of a “great conversation” with Russian President Vladimir Putin, minutes after declaring he could see “the entire war unfolding” through a map of activity on the small satellite constellation he owns, a senior defense official had the following reaction: “Oh dear, this is not good.”

How did we get here?

As part of its February 24, 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russia utilized a malware attack to disable the routers of the American satellite company that had up to that point provided communications to Ukraine. 

As Isaacson writes, without a functioning command system, it was impossible for Ukraine to defend its territory. So top Ukrainian officials appealed directly to Musk, with Federov even urging him over Twitter to send Starlink terminals to link up to SpaceX’s satellite communications system.

To his credit, Musk initially responded enthusiastically, delivering 500 Starlink terminals to Ukraine within days, even jumping on a Zoom with Zelenskyy to go over logistics. At that time, Musk appeared to be a fierce supporter of the cause. He seemed to relish his role as hero, eventually upping the number of donated Starlink terminals to 15,000 by July 2022.

SpaceX’s significant investment of Starlink technology to help Ukraine get back online in those early days was a game-changer for Ukraine. But as the use of Starlink over the ensuing months escalated into more explicitly military operations, Musk began to have doubts. 

As Musk bemoaned to Isaacson:

“Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars. It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good peaceful things, not drone strikes.”

This sentiment was echoed by SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell:

“I’m happy to donate services for ambulances and hospitals and mothers. That’s what companies and people should do. But it’s wrong to pay for military drone strikes.”

But it was SpaceX that had retained the power to turn the donated terminal connection to its satellites on or off, rather than trust the Ukrainians to fight how they needed to with them. That SpaceX found itself in the position of green-lighting drone attacks was a problem of its own making, and too much power had already been vested in one man’s hands. 

It turns out, warning signs over this were flashing long before the Isaacson excerpt was published.

The warning signs

In April 2022, The Washington Post published a piece that would prove prescient, though not in the way first intended.

After Elon Musk offered to purchase Twitter for $44 billion, the Post wrote:

The world’s richest person has bought one of its most influential social media platforms — and Washington’s hands are largely tied.

The Post questioned how someone like Musk, who was “notorious for flouting regulators and running afoul of the Securities and Exchange Commission,” would handle the data privacy of millions of Twitter users as that company’s CEO. 

But that same question applies equally to his ownership of SpaceX and Tesla, which inevitably would raise global security concerns and deep conflicts of interest.

A follow-up article by the Post from last October, titled “As Elon Musk expands his reach, Washington worries,” pointed out how Musk had involved himself in international affairs that should have lay far outside his scope:

Between launching four astronauts and 54 satellites into orbit, unveiling an electric freight truck and taking over Twitter this month, Elon Musk made time to offer unsolicited peace plans for Taiwan and Ukraine, antagonizing those countries’ leaders and irking Washington, too.

It noted that Musk speaks to foreign leaders, including those who work directly with him. He sells SpaceX technology to a growing list of countries, including those critical of U.S. policy such as Turkey. And while he owns Tesla factories at home and in allied nations such as Germany, he also has them in China.

And according to Isaacson’s book, Musk has already admitted that “Twitter would have to be careful about the words it used regarding China, because Tesla business could be threatened. China’s repression of the Uyghurs, he said, ‘has two sides.’” The idea that speech or action by Twitter against Chinese online disinformation or its documented and widescale human rights abuses might be limited in order to protect Musk’s other investments should give all of us pause.

Perhaps most ominously, of the 8,000 satellites orbiting the Earth, more than 4,500 are owned and operated by Starlink. Yes, Musk owns more than half of the world’s satellites

As one anonymous member of Congress, told the Post:

“One thing is clear: Musk believes he knows best, and he will do whatever he wants — and that can be good and it can be bad.”

Or as Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian put it:

“He sees himself as above the presidency.”

On August 30, 2023, The Washington Post Editorial Board published an even more dire warning, titled “Elon Musk’s control over satellite internet demands a reckoning.” 

In it, they broke down the danger of one man having so much power:

The trouble with relying on one key technology for battlefield communications, however, is that it also means relying on whoever controls that technology. And because Starlink is a commercial company rather than a traditional defense contractor, in this case Mr. Musk has largely been able to call the shots — literally.

So, what if anything can be done to rein Elon Musk in?

According to the Post, some in Congress hope to limit Musk’s outsized influence. There is bipartisan agreement that the U.S. should not depend on any one source when it comes to national security, and the government is taking steps to lessen that dependence. 

These include the following measures: 

• NASA has funded Boeing’s Starliner capsule to compete with SpaceX

• Congress also has been encouraging Ford and other automakers to build electric cars.

• The Federal Communications Commission in August decided it would not give SpaceX’s Starlink — which is now operating in 40 countries — a $900 million subsidy to bring broadband to rural areas

There’s also a Federal Trade Commission angle, which Senator Ed Markey raised last November. In the wake of Musk’s dismantling of the “blue check” verification system in favor of a pay-for-play model, Markey was credibly impersonated on Twitter, now owned by Musk.

Musk snarkily dismissed the Senator’s concerns, and in response, Markey tweeted a not-so-veiled threat:

Markey followed up with a letter to the Federal Trade Commission, cosigned by Senator Elizabeth Warren and a handful of other progressive Senators, accusing Twitter under Musk of violating its consent decree, entered into before Musk’s tenure.

This threat was admittedly fairly weak sauce, and demonstrated how little leverage Congress actually had at the time to do much of anything. 

Isaacson’s book may have changed things.

On Tuesday, in the aftermath of this controversy over Musk’s outsized influence over matters of war, Senator Warren has called for an investigation into Musk and Starlink.

“Congress needs to investigate what’s happened here, and whether we have adequate tools to make sure foreign policy is conducted by the government and not by one billionaire.”

On CNN, Warren was asked if Musk essentially has a “veto power in the Ukraine conflict right now?”

Warren responded:

“No one is supposed to make foreign policy for the United States other than the U.S. government. It is not up to one billionaire to go off in secret and change our foreign policy. 

“I think we need an investigation, both from the Department of Defense and from Congress, to look into the arrangement with Elon Musk and his company that would give him the ability to in effect turn off or restrict in any way access for Ukraine or anyone else in contravention of specific policies of the United States of America.

“Those foreign policy decisions are not subcontracted off to one billionaire, they belong to the federal government.” 

There is some hope that Musk and lawmakers might be able to come to a consensus, according to Isaacson in an interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box.

Isaacson described a discussion between Musk and the U.S. government:

“Let us have a certain number of Starlink services and then later a more military version where we get to control it.” 

“Elon Musk said, ‘yes,’ and that’s the right outcome.” 

And in fact, as The New York Times reported in July, the U.S. military has already made moves to take control of “setting where Starlink’s internet signal works inside Ukraine.”

In June, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin approved a Pentagon deal to buy 400 to 500 new Starlink terminals and services…

This appeared intended to provide Ukraine with dedicated terminals and services to conduct sensitive functions without fear of interruption.

At the same time, The Pentagon has begun plans to develop a competing network of low-earth orbit satellites with $1.5 billion in contracts recently awarded to Lockheed Martin and Northrup Grumman for launch in 2026.

According to Defense One:

The so-called “Tranche 2 Transport Layer” is part of a multi-step plan to link future missile tracking satellites with communications satellites in space to enable the military to quickly respond to future highly-maneuverable hypersonic weapons, in addition to improving speed of satellite communications through space-based optical lasers.

While this would only result in 72 satellites to start, it is a crucial first step in creating a world in which, as The Post puts it:

Starlink is no longer the democratic world’s only good option.

But one wonders with Musk: once he has so much power at his fingertips, how likely is he to relinquish it?