The Geopolitics of SpaceX and Elon Musk

Imagine that a single person can decide whether an army has access to the Internet during a war. It sounds like science fiction, but it really happened: during the Ukrainian offensive in Kherson, Elon Musk shut down Starlink for fear of a nuclear escalation, leaving the soldiers without vital connections and forcing them to retreat. When the Polish foreign minister wrote to him that this dependence is dangerous, Musk publicly replied: “Shut up, little man.” The question that usually arises is whether SpaceX makes America more powerful than China or Europe. But that's the wrong question. The real upheaval is that Musk's power is no longer just American: it is a private power that cuts across states and turns national sovereignty into a matter of agreements with a single entrepreneur. We have reached the point where millions of ordinary citizens, through pension funds and stock market indices, are automatic investors in SpaceX, which is now worth over $2 trillion. It's not just about rockets or satellites: SpaceX is a vertical conglomerate where each piece rests on the other. The Falcon 9 rockets, which have made space launches cheaper and more frequent; Starlink, with 10,000 satellites – 70% of all those in orbit – that bring the Internet everywhere; xAI's AI, which aims to put data centers directly in space to bypass the energy limits of the competition. But behind this seemingly unstoppable force lies a fragility: SpaceX exists because governments have chosen to rely on Musk, sometimes out of necessity, sometimes out of the conviction that it was the only way. The European alternatives — such as the Ariane rocket, Eutelsat, and the attempted Airbus-Leonardo merger — were created precisely to contain this power, even if today they do not reach 10% of SpaceX's capacity. In Asia, China has built its own constellation of satellites, and the BRICS countries are resisting: South Africa and India have banned Starlink, and Brazil has even seized Musk's assets after X, his social platform, refused to moderate content that incited a coup. And then there's the regulatory issue: Musk's SpaceX talks about putting a million satellites into orbit, but no one believes that the UN or the International Telecommunication Union will really allow it. Scientists talk about the Kessler risk — that is, a scenario in which collisions between satellites would make space unusable for decades. Yet Musk uses the narrative of the fait accompli, including images of space data centers that do not exist in his presentations, relying on the "financial fabulism" typical of Silicon Valley. Perhaps the most disturbing point is how this dependence is now systemic: more than half of Americans are invested, directly or indirectly, in the tech market. If a politician really wanted to challenge Musk's power, he would risk causing stocks to plummet and, with them, the savings of millions of families. In this sense, SpaceX and Musk are not only too big to fail: they have become a structural pillar of our future choices, whether you like it or not. To think that the solution is simply "more regulation" is naive: the real challenge is to diversify the economy, to invest in sectors such as biotechnology, education, and green manufacturing, in order to loosen Silicon Valley's grip on politics and society. If today a technical decision made by one man can change the course of a war, then the issue is not only geopolitical, but profoundly democratic. When technological power is concentrated in the hands of one person, sovereignty is no longer a matter of borders, but of login. If you thought geopolitics was a game between states, SpaceX shows you that today the decisive move can be made by an entrepreneur with a tweet. If this story has sparked something in you, you can mark I'm In on Lara Notes — whether it's interest, lived experience, or deep conviction. And if you find yourself discussing it with someone, perhaps recounting the Kherson scene or the response to Sikorski, on Lara Notes you can tag whoever was with you with Shared Offline — so that conversation remains. This Note comes from Foreign Policy and saved you 15 minutes of reading.