Elon Musk is His Own Rogue Nation

Elon Musk at a ceremony held to inaugurate Starlink access at a community health center in Denpasar on the Indonesian island of Bali on May 19, 2024. Photo: Sonny Tumbelaka/AFP/Getty Images

On the eve of the 2024 presidential election, Elon Musk has transformed himself into the veritable Republican shadow candidate.

Even before he officially endorsed Donald Trump following the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt, Musk had assumed an unprecedented role in the economic life and pop culture of his adopted country. Like Howard Hughes before him, he’s the United States’ wealthiest industrialist, with the government uncomfortably dependent on his companies and on remaining in his erratic good graces. In one election cycle, Musk has gone from tepid centrist — he’s a former Democrat who used to tout Tesla as an LGBTQ-friendly employer — to chief MAGA propagandist. With the zeal of a convert, Musk espouses a bitter nativism, defending the country from imagined hordes of migrant invaders and woke trans teachers.

While waving his own flag as a proud American entrepreneur dependent on U.S. government subsidies and contracts, Musk has also become a supranational billionaire power player with endless political and economic entanglements that transcend borders. As a political figure, he has his own foreign policy, and his interests don’t always align with those of the United States, nor of the right-wing MAGA movement with which he’s identified himself.

In Sweden, Musk is in a fight with unions and the postal service, which won’t deliver Tesla license plates out of solidarity with a mechanic’s union warring with the company, preventing the cars from being street legal. In Brazil, he conceded to a judge’s content moderation edicts for X. In China, he must maintain friendly, even obsequious relations with an authoritarian regime that could seize his mammoth Tesla factory on a whim and cut off his access to a crucial market for the company’s growth, although it struggles to sell in a year what BYD, the booming Chinese electric vehicle company, sells in a month.

Besides Trump, the most important politician in Musk’s life may be Russian President Vladimir Putin. The limited details of their relationship have dripped out over the last two years in articles in the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere, including from the political scientist Ian Bremmer, who claimed in 2022 that Musk had told him that his views on Russia and the war in Ukraine were informed by his conversations with top Russian officials.

“There’s no stopping Elon Musk, he’s going to do what he thinks he needs to do,” Putin said in an interview earlier this year with Tucker Carlson. “You need to find some common ground with him, you need to search for some ways to persuade him.”

As America’s oligarchs exercise their own foreign policy, they exercise a form of transnational power that shouldn’t belong to any one person.

The language is that of a case officer working a potential asset. How much influence does Putin have over the richest person in the world, who’s also a key contractor for the U.S. security state? “In 2022, Musk was having regular conversations with ‘high-level Russians,’” according to the Journal. “At the time, there was pressure from the Kremlin on Musk’s businesses and ‘implicit threats against him.’”

If Russia is courting and coercing Trump’s most important backer, it’s important to reckon with the implications, especially on the political left, without falling into Russiagate hysteria or neocon hawkishness. It’s a national security issue that should matter to the left, because it’s also about a new kind of borderless plutocratic rule that has downstream effects for all of us. As America’s oligarchs exercise their own foreign policy, they exercise a form of transnational power that shouldn’t belong to any one person.

Since its early years furnishing microchips for Minuteman missiles, the tech industry has been a paid-up member of the defense industrial base. In the post-9/11 years, the symbiotic relationship deepened between Silicon Valley — which discovered mass surveillance as a business model — and the security state, which discovered mass surveillance as a driving ideology. As billions of dollars in government contracts presented themselves, an industry that touted its utopian intent to “change the world” quickly sidestepped the moral quandaries of the war on terror years.

Now, “defense tech” is a booming investment category, as VCs rush to invest in startups that might soon deploy AI-powered drones to Gaza or Ukraine. Andreessen Horowitz, a top venture capital firm that is a major investor in SpaceX, helped finance Musk’s takeover of Twitter and has plowed more cash into Musk’s new AI company, xAI, calling it investing in “American dynamism.”

Silicon Valley’s geopolitics have been captured by a militant right that might denounce the strategic folly of the war in Iraq but is eager to sell weapons to America’s allies and to contribute to an expensive military buildup in order to “deter” China. It’s less a matter of being Democrat or Republican than that they’re self-assured authoritarians with a keen sense of the profit motive. Top industry figures like billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, while ostensibly on opposite sides of the partisan divide, both invest in surveillance tech, drone startups, data analytics companies, and other digital-age staples of the permanent war economy. They might be self-proclaimed libertarians or big-time Democratic donors, but their interests lie with continued U.S. military hegemony.

Musk, who holds a top secret security clearance, has billions in federal contracts for rocket launches at SpaceX, which dominates the satellite launch market and is now launching U.S. spy satellites. But he offers a specific set of contradictions, profiting off his noisome displays of MAGA-style patriotism while back-channeling with Putin.

The popularity of his Starlink internet service, whose network of 6,500 low-earth orbit satellites provides global internet access through small portable terminals, has complicated Musk’s foreign politicking. Although Musk expresses an aversion to being caught up in military conflict, Starlink is clearly suited to disaster and war zones. SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell said that Starlink was “never meant to be weaponized,” but the service quickly became an essential part of the Ukrainian military’s communications infrastructure. Its prominent role led to some refracted glory for Musk in the press. But Musk also complained about the cost of providing Starlink to the Ukrainian government. 

In January 2023, Musk portrayed Ukraine’s Starlink use as a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation and posted that he wasn’t allowing the Ukrainians to use Starlink for “long-range drone strikes.”

In 2022, Musk ordered SpaceX employees to disable the Ukrainian military’s access to its Starlink satellite internet service in order to stop a Ukrainian drone attack on the Russian Black Sea fleet. Musk eventually acknowledged making the decision. He said that he was told that attacking Russian-occupied Crimea was a red line that could lead to Russian nuclear retaliation.

“If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation,” Musk posted in September 2023.

Musk wasn’t acting as a peacemaker, nor had he and SpaceX been neutral to that point. In choosing to intervene during that drone operation, he was not bringing anyone to the negotiating table, preventing atrocity, or advancing a diplomatic effort. He was putting his thumb on the scales for one side, based on conversations with that side’s leader.

In the same period that Ukrainian forces have come to rely on Starlink, Russian forces have also been able to acquire thousands of Starlink terminals. The exact methods aren’t clear — the purchases may be made via front companies overseas — but Russian forces in Ukraine now employ the technology widely. While SpaceX has reportedly made some efforts to disable Russian use of Starlink and has earned public acknowledgments from U.S. military officer, it may have empowered the Russian military effort. In September, an Iranian-made Russian drone that crashed seemed to be running a Starlink connection.

However they acquired the capability, it matters that Russia is using Starlink at scale; that Chechen dictator (and Putin loyalist) Ramzan Kadyrov claims to have Tesla Cybertrucks kitted out with machine guns fighting in Ukraine; and that Putin — the capo dei capi of kleptocrats — reportedly has enough sway over Musk to ask him to not activate Starlink over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese President Xi Jinping. Or even to stop a clandestine Ukrainian naval attack.

Musk has been able to make himself an indispensable partner for a security establishment that no longer trusts him.

Despite all of Musk’s activity seemingly at odds with U.S. security goals, none of his jingoistic tech colleagues are willing to call him out as an unreliable operator, a veritable rogue nation beholden to murky foreign interests. That may say something about their own selfish pursuit of power. And while Musk has become a frequent rhetorical target for Democratic politicians, liberals have yet to hold to account the wayward EV tycoon whose reputation they spent years burnishing. As a result, he has been able to make himself an indispensable partner for a security establishment that no longer trusts him. And now he stands on the verge of acquiring unprecedented influence under a potential second Trump administration.

Musk began quietly subsidizing right-wing political organizations two years ago and only endorsed Trump in July. As a political player with practically unlimited resources and media influence, he’s just beginning to flex his influence. He may be a relative novice in this kind of political arena, but the people he deals with are not. And Putin, an experienced practitioner, seems to be getting something for his efforts.

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