Musk is getting it wrong on India's space "oligarchs". Here's why

Elon Musk may have many strengths. Self-awareness is not one of them.

That characteristic has been on full display over the past few weeks in his fight with India’s government and business elite over satellite communications.

“Certain oligarchs” are blocking Space Exploration Technologies Corp.’s Starlink from providing mobile internet “to maintain their monopolistic chokehold on the Indian people,” he wrote on X earlier this month. If that oblique reference seems a bit coy for a man who once challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight, over the following days he made clear whom he was talking about, with posts describing Reliance Industries Ltd. Chairman Mukesh Ambani, the country’s second-richest man, as “the real boss of India.” A normally tight-lipped Reliance eventually responded with a statement saying that it welcomed competition from Starlink.


Musk has a point about oligarchs — one that his own career demonstrates perfectly. Building orbiting satellite constellations like SpaceX’s Starlink and military-grade Starshield sibling is such an immense financial undertaking, with such profound and long-standing implications for national security and enduring market power, that only an extraordinarily well-funded and politically adept business leader could even contemplate it.

Right now, Musk’s own “monopolistic chokehold” extends across much of the planet, as the government of Ukraine discovered last week when it found its military communications throttled in the heat of fighting with Russia. If India’s government wants to avoid that sort of dependency, it’s not corruption — it’s just realpolitik.

Also read | Jio wants satellite broadband that connects 'every Indian home,' says Akash Ambani

It’s worth understanding what’s really at stake here. For all Musk’s commentary about children going without education for lack of internet access, India’s high population density and enormous market means it’s actually pretty well-connected.

In terms of the 4G standard that ran your mobile internet during the 2010s, it does better than France, Japan or the US itself, with coverage at 99.2% of the population. For the faster 5G that’s becoming standard in the post-Covid era, the figure is a somewhat less impressive 86.2%, but that’s still better than Malaysia or New Zealand. The problem for India is not that large numbers of people can’t physically access mobile internet — it’s that many of the poorest can’t afford to pay for it. That’s not something that Starlink’s far more costly satellite service is going to fix.

The real question, then, isn’t who can sell Indians the cheapest broadband. It’s whose communications infrastructure the nation is willing to depend on for critical services such as military command and targeting data, surveillance feeds, and diplomatic and intelligence traffic.

India has three possible routes emerging. Starlink’s technological lead is overwhelming. It has more than half of all operational devices circling the planet, and 15 times more than its nearest competitor. Ukraine’s decision to use Starlink and Starshield, in spite of Musk’s cozy relationship with the Russia-curious Trump administration, is a powerful demonstration of how a hard-pressed government must sometimes put operational efficiency ahead of communications sovereignty.

Also read | India weighs security checkpoint for Starlink, global satcom firms

It’s telling that Kyiv hasn’t treated the next-biggest constellation out there as a serious competitor. With more than 600 satellites in low-Earth orbit, Eutelsat Communications SACA is headquartered in Paris, with major shareholders including the French and British governments as well as Bharti Enterprises Ltd., headed by billionaire Sunil Mittal, founder of India’s second-biggest mobile network.

For all its big-money backing, Eutelsat and its OneWeb constellation are simply too small and underfunded to compete. Its market capitalization of about $2.3 billion is roughly one-thousandth of SpaceX’s. Analysts don’t expect it to make a profit this side of 2030. The mere hint that Ukraine might look at switching to it was sufficient to drive Eutelsat’s beaten-down shares up 28% last week. Such a move is unlikely: Starlink and Starshield are already so established that the country is more or less locked in.

That’s where Ambani comes in. Right now, Reliance doesn’t have a single satellite in the low-Earth orbit needed for the fastest communications. But its ambition, once the $3.2 billion initial public offering of its Jio telecoms unit is out of the way this week, is to launch about 1,600 such orbiters. That could finally be a worthy competitor to SpaceX’s dominance.

Musk is misreading India’s political and business environment if he thinks New Delhi is being driven by friendliness to Ambani or Mittal, or hostility to Starlink. Governments choosing strategic infrastructure care about something more durable: Who has the best service, and who can switch it off in the midst of a crisis.

Strategically, the best course of action for New Delhi isn’t to favor any one competitor, but to keep them in tension. Musk’s Starlink can promise capability, but not local control. OneWeb offers some leverage via Mittal’s shareholding, but has far more limited ability to invest. Ambani might offer the best of both worlds: A willingness to spend on a SpaceX-style scale, combined with $164 billion of assets on the ground in India that could give New Delhi influence it could never have over Starlink and Starshield.

That’s a decisive point in favor of Reliance and Jio. Countries have no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests. That’s as true in space as it is on the ground.


Views expressed here are the author's own, and not EconomicTimes.com's