Elon Musk is a national security risk; he can’t be allowed to escape regulatory scrutiny via tantrums

Elon Musk is a national security risk; he can’t be allowed to escape regulatory scrutiny via tantrums

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, should drop hard selling the ‘philanthropist’ act because no one is buying it. His recent string of posts on India regarding the space-based internet service, Starlink, are low on facts and high on rhetoric, raising doubts about his real intentions. First, Musk makes a huge deal out of India’s 11,256 villages still lacking 4G mobile coverage. What he doesn’t tell you, of course, is that out of the total 6,44,131 villages across the country recorded by the Registrar General of India, 6,29,027 villages (97.65 per cent) had mobile connectivity, and 6,23,512 villages (96.80 per cent) were equipped with 4G coverage till May 2025. Under the government’s 4G Saturation Scheme (a mega digital initiative by the Centre to provide 4G connectivity to all remaining uncovered villages), the numbers have expanded still. Now 6,34,019 villages (98.43 per cent) in India have mobile coverage, while dedicated 4G coverage has risen to 6,30,676 villages (97.91 per cent) leaving only a fraction uncovered — primarily in the most remote, inaccessible terrains. What Musk — the benevolent trillionaire with a saviour complex — also doesn’t tell you is that India’s rapid expansion represents a stunning achievement when set against regional and global benchmarks. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) estimates global rural 4G population coverage at approximately 84 per cent, with India’s lower-middle-income peers and neighbours like Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal struggling due to fund constraints, severe right-of-way bottlenecks and sparse coverage across tough topography. In comparison, India has managed a near-total rural 4G saturation across an immense continental landscape of over 6.4 lakh villages, creating a digital network that outpaces most developing nations and sets a new benchmark for last-mile state capacity and delivery. When you strip away Musk’s projected image of an ‘altruistic do-gooder’ whose heart beats for India’s rural poor, his recent outbursts against the Indian government — alleging that New Delhi is ‘blocking’ Starlink in cahoots with “oligarchs” — is stranger still when measured against the ground realities of India’s satellite communications sector. Musk attempted to frame the delay in Starlink’s rollout as a ‘crime against the people of India’, floating a theory that a conspiracy is being hatched by powerful corporate interests to freeze out foreign competition. This victimhood narrative unravels on closer inspection of India’s regulatory landscape. The owner of SpaceX claims that Starlink is being “stalled”; the reason for the delay is not a ‘monopolistic’ blockade, rather a legitimate national security protocol that applies uniformly to every entity attempting to provide space-based internet services in the country. All competitors are currently stuck at the same level of regulatory scrutiny, making Musk’s accusations of sabotage sound hollow. The bottleneck in question is the mandatory security clearance overseen by the Union home ministry, which evaluates whether operators may comply with India’s sovereign data localisation and interception norms. In response to Musk’s repeated provocations, India’s ministry of communications has clarified through a statement that its authorisation framework is “fair and non-discriminatory”, every licensee must comply with security conditions for which the assessment is under way, and “all three entities are at broadly the same regulatory stage”. In reply to Musk’s accusations that Starlink is being deliberately singled out, Communications Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia said Friday that India “does not allow a monopoly in any sector… For us in the department of telecommunications, we are technology agnostic”, according to media reports, adding “Our job is to be able to provide the bouquet of services to every single customer. It is for the customer to choose, in a free market, which service he or she prefers, and within that service bouquet, which company’s service he or she prefers”. The ministry statement explicitly noted that Starlink, Reliance Industries’ Jio Satellite Communications, and the Bharti Airtel-backed Eutelsat OneWeb have all been granted licenses and are currently undergoing the same security assessment phase. These security parameters require all satellite communication operators to establish local data centres, ensure domestic routing of traffic, and provide Domain Name System (DNS) resolution within Indian territory before they can be assigned spectrum. Since domestic telecom operators are subjected to broadly the same security vetting as Starlink, the claim of discrimination is entirely misconceived and even mischievous. In fact, given that Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel's satellite ventures are stuck in the same regulatory queue, Musk’s tantrums appear less like a legitimate grievance and more like a tactical manoeuvre aimed at browbeating Indian regulatory authorities. By weaponising his massive social media reach and invoking populist rhetoric about “oligarchs denying internet to the rural poor”, Musk seems intent on manufacturing public pressure to fast-track his own approvals. The outbursts, therefore, appear as a calculated attempt to extract special concessions or bypass the due process that sovereign nations demand for satellite data routing. If New Delhi capitulates to Musk’s pressure tactics and allows Starlink to operate without stringent regulatory oversight, that would not only be unfair to competitors who would be punished for their compliance, it will also establish a dangerous precedent of regulatory exceptionalism. Circumventing standard scrutiny for Starlink would result in a massive concentration of power in the hands of the world’s richest man who is driven by ‘saviour activism’. Musk already wields unprecedented, quasi-state influence over global communications through his vast satellite constellation and ownership of the social media platform. Allowing him to operate a critical layer of digital infrastructure across a nation of 1.4 billion people without strict adherence to sovereign norms or addressing India’s security concerns would effectively mean a surrender of India’s sovereign authority. It would transform a vital national utility into an unregulated fiefdom controlled by a single individual with a documented history of acting on his geopolitical fancies, exposing the state to immense strategic vulnerabilities. Musk is no ordinary industrialist. He not only owns one of the world’s most influential ‘digital public square’ in X, but also controls a unique monopoly over global space access and satellite internet through SpaceX. Even more importantly, he has demonstrated a persistent hunger for meddling in the domestic politics of sovereign states around the world driven by a deep sense of ideological activism. He routinely takes sides, amplifies polarising rhetoric, inserts himself as an external arbiter of politics in sovereign states and attempts to shape their electoral narratives to match his worldview. When combined with unregulated control over critical communication infrastructure, this interventionism poses a profound danger to open, multi-ethnic democracies. Musk’s infamous record across sovereign capitals reveals a disregard for democratic boundaries. In Germany, he called then Chancellor Olaf Scholz an ‘incompetent fool’ while leveraging his platform to amplify talking points aligned with the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD). During the 2024 unrest in the UK, he declared that “civil war is inevitable” while actively undermining the Keir Starmer administration. In Brazil, Musk engaged in an aggressive showdown with the Supreme Court, defying judicial orders targeting disinformation campaigns associated with Jair Bolsonaro before legal sanctions forced a retreat. Conversely, he has showered political patronage on ideological allies such as Argentina’s Javier Milei. Musk is adept at using Starlink as a weapon. He took a unilateral decision to restrict Starlink’s geofencing over Crimea during the Ukraine war, effectively sabotaging a military operation. In Iran, he undermined the Iranian regime by activating Starlink’s internet service and later waiving all subscription fees during nationwide internet blackouts triggered by anti-government protests. By providing space-based coverage that operates completely outside terrestrial infrastructure, Musk enabled activists to utilise tens of thousands of smuggled Starlink terminals. This allowed protesters to bypass state-enforced communication blocks, coordinate demonstrations, and upload real-time videos of the protests and the crackdown to global media. This proven willingness to play arbiter in foreign domestic affairs makes Musk uniquely dangerous for India, a continent-sized democracy navigating delicate linguistic, communal, regional, and ethnic fault lines. Communications infrastructure in such an environment is not just a utility. It is the central nervous system of the state’s political stability. Allowing Starlink to operate without strict sovereign guardrails such as statutory regulatory compliance would grant an external, unaccountable tycoon critical leverage over India’s information space. In moments of internal strife, security crises, or border confrontations since India shares borders with adversarial states always on the lookout for security vulnerabilities, the Indian state needs assurance that critical networks cannot be weaponised, manipulated, or abruptly severed. A private actor who treats national legal systems as negotiable and sovereign borders as irrelevant could easily exploit India’s domestic divisions by amplifying partisan narratives while controlling the communication channels through his space-based internet service outside India’s terrestrial control. National sovereignty requires critical infrastructure to remain subordinate to the rule of law and the constitutional authority. To exempt Starlink from the rigorous national security vetting, which Musk seems to be aiming for, would be an abdication of sovereign duty. The precedent set by Washington offers an instructive parallel for New Delhi. Citing national security risks, regulators have systematically expelled Chinese state-backed telecom giants such as Huawei, ZTE, China Telecom, and China Mobile from American networks. In some cases, operating licenses are being revoked and supply-chain restrictions are being tightened. The US doctrine holds that Chinese telecom giants are susceptible to pressure from the Chinese Communist Party and therefore it creates an unacceptable vulnerability for espionage, data exfiltration and strategic leverage. This logic underscores why India must maintain abundance of caution toward Starlink. With Musk deeply integrated into the Donald Trump White House power structure, the boundary separating private Silicon Valley enterprise from American statecraft has effectively dissolved. Dual-use satellite constellations are powerful geopolitical instruments. Just as Washington refused to permit Beijing-linked hardware near its critical networks, New Delhi cannot ignore that Starlink could readily be subordinated to American strategic objectives—whether deployed as a tool for diplomatic coercion, intelligence gathering, or interference during bilateral friction or regional crises. When one of the world’s most powerful men who commands technological choke points shows zero regard for sovereign authority and routinely uses assets to settle political scores, the issue ceases to be one of free-market enterprise. Elon Musk is fundamentally a national security risk.