Elon Musk – the unofficial US president – wades into global politics again

Oops he did it again. Twice. 

I’m talking about the disruptive element that is Elon Musk. We had confirmation he’d bypassed governments to prevent a Ukrainian submarine drone attack on Russian-occupied Crimea. Then he bypassed the ‘mainstream media’ and interviewed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter – and scored audience figures CNN can only dream of.

First this week’s interview. Seven million people watched it within an hour of it being posted on X. Both interviewer and interviewee knew exactly what they were doing. On his trip to the US, Netanyahu could count on a hostile reception from the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNCB etc. The solution was to fly to California to see Musk with whom there would be a meeting of profit motives.

Musk asked questions but didn’t interrupt answers, and mostly didn’t come back with tough follow ups. So, Netanyahu was able to lay out at length his justifications for judicial reform in Israel, he also took the opportunity to ask Musk to “roll back” antisemitism on X, and to joke that, because of the power he now wields, Musk was “the unofficial president of the United States”. It was classic ‘Bibi’. Older readers may remember his superb performance on CNN during the first Gulf War in 1991. With Saddam Hussein’s potentially nerve gas tipped Scud missiles landing in Israel, Netanyahu, then deputy foreign minister, donned a gas mask and spoke through it during a live interview. It was the making of a man who understands the media and has grasped the meaning and power of new media.

Musk meanwhile was not only getting millions of viewers for X (25 million within 24 hours). He was forging a relationship with the leader of a country which is the global capital of new tech start-up companies, which intends to be a world leader in Artificial Intelligence, and which has a thriving space industry. Netanyahu’s quip about Musk being the unofficial president underlines how much new tech private enterprise can be an alternative power base to mainstream media and government.

This was shown by last week’s confirmation by Musk that he had refused an emergency request by Kyiv to switch on and extend the satellite coverage of his Starlink network about 100 miles ‘all the way to Sebastopol”. This would have allowed Ukrainian submarine drones to attack the Russian fleet at anchor in the port. Musk refused on the grounds that “if I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation”. The drones washed ashore harmlessly. The New York Times interpreted this as Musk making “the decision to prevent a Ukrainian attack”. Another way of looking at it is that he preferred not to facilitate an attack. Musk later said another reason not to extend coverage into Crimea is that it would have broken US sanctions against Russia although that is uncertain. 

Whether you agree with his rationale or not the point remains that a major tech company has the power to prevent or facilitate a foreign power taking military action against another foreign power. This is new territory and a step up from last year’s decision by Musk’s SpaceX company to get the Ukrainian internet back up and running in the regions where the Russians had smashed connectivity. He flew in thousands of Starlink dishes/terminals, allowing ordinary Ukrainians access to the internet to get in touch with loved ones, find routes out of dangerous regions, and reconnect back to the twenty-first century. 

Naturally, the Ukrainian military also accessed the service to target enemy forces, using it to guide drones and artillery and link front line commanders. The Russian military responded by trying to dazzle the Starlink network using its Peresvet laser weapons.  A game of cat and mouse has been going on for the past 19 months as Russia continues to dazzle and spoof satellites, while Starlink takes measures to evade such attacks. Last year, Russia issued a statement which, without naming Starlink, said that commercial companies behaving in this manner were legitimate military targets.

In this example, Musk has the debatable get out clause that he reconnected Ukrainian civilians but that, if the military then piggy backed the tech, he is not responsible. Actively assisting Kyiv to attack Russian ships is a different matter and one he knew would have drawn a more hostile response that dazzling. 

Russia has a long arm on both the Earth and in space. On Earth, its intelligence services and saboteurs operate in numerous countries. It is also one of just four countries to have launched a ballistic missile from Earth and hit one of their own satellites in space to test if it can be done. Hitting a ‘constellation’ of small satellites such as Starlink is more difficult, but SpaceX has many assets in space. Such threats are not necessarily why Musk turned down the Ukrainian request, but it must have been factored into decision making. In other, theoretical scenarios, for example where one country asks for help against another which has no way of hurting Musk’s commercial interests, a different decision might be made. 

During his interview with Netanyahu, Musk revealed that the government in Tehran had sent him a letter complaining about the presence of Starlink terminals in Iran. These are being used to bypass the regime’s shutdown of domestic internet services in response to the widespread anti-government demonstrations. Tehran says up to 800 terminals are operating, last year Musk puts the figure at around 100. Starlink has to authorise the terminals to be online, something the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said was a “violation of Iran’s sovereignty” adding that such “efforts will not go unanswered.”

In the interview Musk was amused, joking that he was surprised that the letter did not have “Death to America and Israel” written on it. The Iranians were not amused. Nor are the Russians. New tech, new times. 

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