Angelina Katsanis/POLITICO via AP Images
Elon Musk cheers at a Donald Trump rally at Madison Square Garden in New York on Oct. 27, 2024. Another speaker at the rally called Puerto Rico a "floating island of garbage."
Just as Elon Musk has gone all in for Donald Trump, donating a total of $132 million, commandeering Trump’s ground game operation, posting even more over-the-top tweets than the campaign’s own messages, and hoping to take over several realms of policy, we learn courtesy of The Wall Street Journal that Musk has had several backchannel conversations with Vladimir Putin. This is the same Musk whose SpaceX company is used by NASA for the majority of its rocket launches, and whose Starlink system of low-orbit satellites is the basis for some military communications.
All of this has occurred at a time the U.S. has been redoubling its efforts to keep sensitive technologies with military uses out of the hands of China. But when it comes to the most sensitive space and communications satellite technologies, the fox is not only already in the chicken coop. The fox owns the chicken coop.
According to the Journal, in February Musk called on his echo chamber to lobby the Senate to vote down an aid package for Ukraine. “There is no way in hell that Putin is going to lose,” Musk said during a February audio event on X.
Early in the war, the U.S. thanked Musk for helping Ukraine by providing Starlink for Ukraine’s battlefield communications. But later, it was revealed that Musk had denied a request by Ukraine to enable Starlink in Crimea to allow an attack on Russian ships. In effect, Musk has his own foreign policy, and it increasingly tilted toward Russia.
In its most recent investigative story, the Journal revealed that Musk has had several conversations with Putin. At one point, Putin asked Musk to avoid activating his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping. SpaceX, which operates Starlink, won a $1.8 billion classified contract in 2021 and is the primary rocket launcher for the Pentagon and NASA.
The heavy dependence of U.S. military and space systems on Musk did not begin with Trump. It goes back to the Obama and Bush presidencies, and you can characterize it as one part the hollowing out and quasi-privatization of NASA, and one part the growing concentration of the aerospace industry.
After this wave, with the number of in-house engineers cut by half, NASA was more reliant on contractors. It’s not as if defense and space officials were blasé about Musk’s monopoly position. They tried, and substantially failed to find other suppliers.
According to Tim Fernholz, a former Prospect writing fellow who is author of the authoritative book on Musk’s rise to dominance in the space, satellite, and military communications industries, Rocket Billionaires, “The Defense Department has spent billions trying to get United Launch Alliance, the Boeing/Lockheed Martin joint venture that was the incumbent monopolist prior to SpaceX, and Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origin to field competing launch vehicles, but both of those programs are years behind schedule.”
Despite Musk’s personal weirdness and his corrupt propensity for mixing business and political interests that rivals even Trump’s, his companies do make good cars and good rockets. “The main reason that SpaceX dominates the launch vehicle market is that its technology and execution is better and cheaper than that of its competition,” Fernholz told me. “Musk’s critics often try to hand-wave around this, but the fact is that SpaceX is a well-run company. It’s baffling to many people in the industry that Blue Origin has been around for longer than SpaceX but still hasn’t launched anything to orbit. United Launch Alliance has suffered from problems that we see in many traditional military engineering projects like the F-35 program, including delivery delays and rising prices.”
It is illegal for a private citizen to have their own foreign policy, least of all with an enemy great power. Some might dare call it treason.
Musk was also a risk-taker. The design for SpaceX’s Starlink network was seen by others in the satellite communications industry as too risky. “A similar network called Teledesic was attempted in the nineties and went out of business,” says Fernnolz. “By deploying a network that most of the industry didn’t think would work, SpaceX was able to get a huge head start over its competitors.”
Walter Isaacson, Musk’s biographer, concurs. He told The New York Times that no other company “has been able to make reusable rockets, or get astronauts into orbit, or get some of these heavy satellites into high-Earth orbit.”
Should Trump be elected, we can imagine an even tighter technical and political alliance with Musk, unless Musk becomes even more flagrant in trying to usurp Trump’s power. It’s one thing to have a private foreign policy when Biden is president, but quite another when Trump is president. In a dictatorship, there is only room for one dictator at a time.
But if Harris is elected, the defense and space programs will need to redouble their efforts to find alternatives to Musk. This of course cannot be done overnight. For now, both agencies have been negotiating deals to try to gain more control of technology, even when partly reliant on Musk. The Pentagon’s Space Development Agency, says Fernholz, is purchasing its own network of Starlink satellites called Starshield that it will control explicitly. The Defense Department is also working with Amazon, which is building a Starlink competitor expected to launch in the next twelve months.
It may be necessary for government to de-privatize some of NASA, and for defense agencies to take back some of their own technical competence from contractors.
As for Musk, he is vulnerable on a few grounds. He has top-secret clearance, and he has backchannel conversations with Putin. He could lose his clearance and access to data necessary to his NASA and Pentagon contracts. It is illegal for a private citizen to have their own foreign policy, least of all with an enemy great power. Some might dare call it treason.
Musk could also have antitrust problems. There have been reports that SpaceX has used its dominant position in anti-competitive ways—underpricing its rocket launches to make it more difficult for launch vehicle competitors, and negotiating concessions of radio spectrum when launching competing satellites.
If Harris is elected, Musk will be a monumental headache. And if Trump wins, they will be two scorpions in a bottle.
