Has Power of Starlink Turned Elon Musk Into Tech Oligarch?

Israeli communications minister Shlomo Karhi announced on Monday that a preliminary agreement had been reached with SpaceX allowing the company’s Starlink Internet satellites to operate in the Gaza Strip.

Musk arrived in Israel this week for talks with senior Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog, ostensibly to discuss the risks of “rising anti-Semitism online,” less than two weeks after the tech billionaire’s endorsement of what Israel’s defenders and legacy media have dubbed to be an “anti-Semitic post.”

In late October, Musk promised to provide Starlink Internet access to internationally-recognized aid organizations working in Gaza after the strip’s Internet link to the outside world was cut off by the Israeli military.

Musk replied that he was “not so naïve” and that “extraordinary measures” would be taken to make sure that Starlink would be used only “for purely humanitarian reasons,” with both the US and Israeli governments doing a “security check” before SpaceX turned on “even a single terminal.”

Musk’s wrangling with Tel Aviv amid the Palestinian-Israeli crisis is at least the second time in less than a year that the billionaire's Starlink satellite constellations have turned into a political and even geostrategic bargaining chip in a major crisis.

Musk’s decision sparked a vicious dispute with Ukrainian officials, with a senior advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accusing the billionaire of “committing evil” by not allowing SpaceX assets to be used in Crimea attacks.

Musk responded with a meme tweet mocking President Zelensky.

Not allowing itself to become dependent on the American businessman’s good graces, Russia deployed an array of radio-electronic warfare tools to counter Starlink, prompting Musk to admit last October that defending the satellites against cyberattacks and jamming was “getting harder” and that even amid the diversion of resources, “Starlink may still die.”

Besides Gaza and Ukraine, Starlink has been caught in the crosshairs of skepticism from observers and governments around the world for its potential entanglement in global conflicts.

In Latin America, for instance, the satellite Internet service has reportedly become popular among criminals gangs operating in remote areas of the Amazon rainforest. In Iran, authorities have expressed concerns about Starlink’s use by pro-Western protesters seeking to overthrow the country’s government.

In Africa, observers have expressed concerns about Starlink’s contracts to supply Internet access to the US and French militaries, thus helping to prop up the West's attempts to hang on to a unipolar world order dominated by the United States and its allies.

It's worth remembering that Musk, despite his level-headedness on issues like the use of Starlink in Crimea, has not been above advancing the Western unipolar agenda. In 2020, responding to a person critical of the US government’s sponsorship of a coup in Bolivia, which is rich in lithium used in the batteries powering Tesla's electric cars, Musk quipped that the US would “coup whoever we want!”

Whatever Musk’s motivations are when it comes to the deployment of Starlink satellites in global geopolitical hotspots, the question worth asking isn’t whether they contribute or take away from global peace and international security, but whether it’s acceptable for one individual to wield a comic book supervillain-level amount of power over access to vital communication technologies.

On one hand, America’s global adversaries looking to build a fair, multipolar world can thank fate that SpaceX is owned by Musk, and not a neoconservative or neoliberal ideologue like George Soros, who would undoubtedly use such technological power to help Washington ‘spread democracy’ with the help of soft power tools, color revolution coups, and Tomahawk cruise missile 'freedom bombs. On the other, it must always be kept in mind that Musk’s allegiance is to the United States (and its military-industrial complex), and any country looking to preserve its sovereignty will have to rely on its own technological capabilities to counter SpaceX’s assets, not the billionaire’s good will.

The attempted privatization and monopolization of space is also not the only problem created by Musk’s ambitions. For years now, astronomers have expressed concerns about the threat SpaceX’s mega constellations of satellites pose to earth-based astronomical observations, pointing out, for example, that the satellites could make spotting potential deadly asteroids in outer space much more difficult, and clutter Earth’s orbit with space junk.

Starlink poses a danger to other spacecraft, too, with a recent analysis revealing that the company’s satellites have had to make over 25,000 collision-avoidance maneuvers between December 2022 and May 2023 alone, with the problem expected to get exponentially worse as the number of manmade objects in space continues to grow.

As if that weren’t enough of a problem, scientists have recently discovered another issue related to Musk’s satellites – the aurora-like light produced by rockets launching them into orbit, which is aid to be a telltale sign that a hole is being torn into the ionosphere, the uppermost layer of Earth’s atmosphere whose existence is crucial for life on this planet.

The potentially fantastical, comic book-villain-style power afforded to Musk via Starlink, and SpaceX’s potential threat to the future of humanity’s exploration of the stars, are signs of a broader problem – the privatization of space - something that's been warned about many science fiction writers going back to the dawning of the space age.

With governments in the United States and Europe ceding control of space-based activities to private entities like Musk’s SpaceX, Bezos’ Blue Origin and Branson’s Virgin Galactic, the future of humanity’s space activities threatens to look less like Stanley Kubrick’s science fiction epic 2001: A Space Odyssey, and more like Paul Verhoeven’s dystopian thriller Total Recall, where cutthroat competition, not cooperation between nations regulated by international treaty, determines acceptable codes of contact.

But perhaps this approach shouldn't come as a surprise, given that even some nations, the United States in particular, have rejected proposed models for outer space cooperation floated by countries like Russia and China, in favor of an effort to preserve their own dwindling global hegemony, including by dismissing treaties seeking to prevent the militarization of outer space.