While his influence is showing up from Ukraine to China, he still lacks the ability to make the law
Big businesses and billionaires usually steer clear of political controversy. If they exercise power, they prefer to do it in the shadows.
Elon Musk is different. In recent weeks, he has endorsed Donald Trump and conducted a softball interview with him on X, the social media platform that he owns. Musk is also engaged in a bitter public feud with the Supreme Court of Brazil, which banned X last week. He has recently claimed that civil war is inevitable in Britain and responded to the arrest in France of Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, by posting: “POV: It’s 2030 in Europe and you’re being executed for liking a meme.”
The ownership of X has handed Musk a massive megaphone to broadcast his views. But focusing on his social media platform obscures the real extent and source of his geopolitical power.
It is the control of SpaceX, Starlink and Tesla that have given Musk a central role in the war in Ukraine and in the growing rivalry between the US and China; as well as a walk-on part in the war in Gaza.
In these conflicts, Musk’s role is more ambiguous than in the west’s culture wars. His unpredictable interventions — combined with immense technological and financial power — make him an unguided geopolitical missile, whose whims can reshape world affairs.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, one of its first goals was to knock out the internet access. By providing Ukraine with access to Starlink, his satellite internet service, Musk kept the country’s armed forces in the fight at a critical moment.
Later in the conflict, however, Musk chose to restrict Ukrainian access to Starlink — so as to hamper any effort to attack Russian forces in Crimea. Musk cited the risk of a third world war as justification. That action — allied to his promotion of a peace plan that incorporated some Russian demands — made Musk much less popular in Kyiv. But his view of the risks of a third world war were not that different from those of the Biden administration.
Where Musk and the US government have really parted company is over China. The opening of a massive Tesla factory in Shanghai in 2019 is seen in Washington as a major setback for the American goal of staying ahead of China in the key technologies of the future. China is now the world’s leading producer of electric vehicles and US officials believe that Chinese manufacturers have learnt from — and sometimes stolen from — Tesla.
The Biden administration is trying to persuade America’s leading tech companies to diversify away from China and was encouraged when Musk scheduled a visit to India earlier this year, with a view to opening a Tesla plant there. But, at the last minute, Musk cancelled and turned up in Beijing instead. In China, he announced an intensification of Tesla’s relationship with the country. The Shanghai factory now produces more than half the Teslas manufactured globally.
American officials note that Musk’s championship of free speech — and willingness to insult world leaders — does not extend to China. X has long been banned in China but Musk is scrupulously respectful towards Xi Jinping, China’s dictatorial leader.
Another foreign leader who seems to have got Musk’s measure is Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. Musk has been accused of promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories on X. But it was his proposal to provide Starlink to aid organisations in Gaza that really alarmed the Israeli government — which claimed this would help Hamas. After a visit to Israel last year, Musk agreed that he would only operate Starlink in Gaza with Israeli approval.
The Biden administration is uneasy about many of Musk’s activities. But his companies have technological capabilities that even the US government lacks. To keep Ukraine connected, when Musk wavered, the Pentagon had to contractwith Starlink. When Nasa wants to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station, it is SpaceX that makes it happen.
If Musk often talks and acts as if he is more powerful than any government it may be because, in certain respects, that is true.
But governments retain one key power that still eludes Musk; the ability to make and enforce the law. The clash between Brazil and X — and the arrest of Durov in France — are both signals that the age of social media impunity is coming to an end in the democratic world. (It never existed in the authoritarian world.)
Social media companies are increasingly likely to be regulated more like legacy media companies and that has costly implications. Last year, Fox News had to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787.5mn to settle defamation claims, stemming from Fox’s reporting of conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election.
X is full of conspiracy theories — some of them promoted by Musk himself. For all his wealth and his undoubted brilliance as an engineer and entrepreneur, Musk will remain subject to the laws of the countries he operates in. That dawning realisation may account for his increasingly furious fulminations against Brazil, Britain, the EU and the state of California — and any one else who dares to stand in his way.
X is not the source of Musk’s power. But it could mark the spot where his power is limited.
https://www.ft.com/content/b384c68c-a8b8-42ea-8786-337d962c2e96?countryCode=TUR
