Why The Pentagon’s Crush on Elon Musk is Dangerous For Democracy

SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s current spat with the Pentagon over who will pay for satellite internet services over Ukraine illustrates how the future of democracy is vulnerable to the whims of authoritarian-minded tech magnates. But in the case of Musk, Pentagon officials are partially to blame. 

Musk is a villain to some and a hero to others.  While tweeting affinity for Donald Trump and Kanye West, his company SpaceX owns the Starlink communications satellites that are keeping much internet connectivity up in Ukraine. But until recently, for senior military leaders, he represented a model for how to build things in the age of information technology. Musk would headline military conferences where he would lecture the Defense Department on what it needed to do to be faster and cheaper. He would host key military leaders for private dinners, leaders who spoke about him in public with unguarded adulation. 

“Look at SpaceX in this country,” said retired Gen. John Hyten, then former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in 2020, lauding how quickly the company was able to learn from launch failures. “Did they stop? No… They launched rapidly again. They changed systems. They changed subsystems. They go in a completely different direction." The anecdote painted a contrast between Musk’s nimble methods and the cumbersome process of Defense Department technology development. For a military that has become obsessed with remaking itself in the mode of a Silicon Valley startup, Musk emerged as a cross between Thomas Edison and Moses. 

Of course SpaceX and Musk owe much to the Pentagon and to the federal government. The Air Force and the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, were among the company’s first and most critical backers. Contracts from the DARPA Falcon program in 2005 and the NASA s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program in 2006 helped the company produce the Dragon spacecraft and the Falcon 9 rocket that would be key drivers for its growth. Musk has said how NASA contracts also have been important to the company’s survival. As a result, SpaceX has moved faster than the rest of the private satellite launch market. And SpaceX has emerged as a major player in virtually every area where the military uses space.

Just how deep is the Pentagon’s reliance on Musk? The U.S. military in recent years has given extraordinary attention to how it is increasingly reliant on space to operate, notably with the creation of the Space Force. In the years ahead the Defense Department will launch hundreds of new satellites to detect and track threats like hypersonic missiles. Space-based satellite images will become even more critical to intelligence collection, and increasingly, to battlefield maneuvers. Advanced communications satellites that transfer vast amounts of battlefield information from one point to another are the cornerstone of the Pentagon’s plans for so-called “joint, all-domain warfare.” From launching image satellites to building missile-tracking satellites and, of course, satellite communications through Starlink, SpaceX is a major player in the military’s most important space-related endeavors.

Last week, amid Musk’s public threat to bill the Pentagon for Starlink services in Ukraine that SpaceX was initially providing for free (which he abandoned days later), the Pentagon’s deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh said “There’s not just SpaceX, there are other entities that we can certainly partner with when it comes to providing Ukraine what they need on the battlefield.” But Singh would not name other options to SpaceX, which says a lot about the current state of space access. The Pentagon isn’t very reliant on Starlink at this time; Ukraine is. But getting to space without SpaceX is like the Beatles without John: not a good bargain. 

The satellite communications capabilities provided by Musk’s company are playing a major role in the fight against Russia’s invading forces in Ukraine. From Donetsk to Frankfurt, Starlink is enabling Ukraine’s rapid use of intelligence to out maneuver Russian forces and connecting Ukrainians with weapons maintainers and suppliers to quickly bring damaged weapons back online and bring replacements in. 

The battlefield utility of Starlink has given Musk a certain amount of leverage over the people of Ukraine. As Russia has increased its nuclear saber-rattling, Musk has decided to exert it (and do so at a time when he was also asking the Pentagon for money to continue the Starlink services.) A few weeks ago, Musk casually floated on Twitter that Ukraine should simply cede the stolen Crimean Peninsula to Russia.

Ukrainians and others attempted to remind Musk that Crimea was illegally seized and so is by definition Ukrainian. The Kremlin continues a persecution campaign against the Tatars on the peninsula and uses Crimea as a hub to push troops into Ukraine and extend its reach into the Black Sea. Ukrainians were rightly upset that Musk spoke for them and their interests. Western experts on Russia such as Fiona Hill, a former U.S. intelligence official who is now senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, accused Musk of essentially laundering Russian talking points on Twitter. Musk responded by retweeting an opinion piece by venture capitalist turned podcaster David Sacks, warning that  “neocons and the woke left” were leading the United States towards nuclear war. 

It takes the sort of extreme arrogance of a US technology entrepreneur to substitute his own opinion in the place of democratically-elected presidents and officials across the entire Western world, international institutions like NATO, hundreds of diplomats, foreign affairs professionals, journalists, freedom advocates and, of course, Ukrainians. That’s why the very thing that makes Musk such a successful tech entrepreneur also makes him a danger. 

There’s a reason that Defense Department bureaucracy moves at the pace that it does and why it is structurally risk averse. Pentagon leadership is accountable to Congress and the public. While Pentagon decision-makers can and must create a new relationship with risk and remove hobbling barriers, they are still ultimately beholden to the same mechanisms of government and public scrutiny that enable democracy. 

SpaceX, on the other hand, being a privately-held company functions very much like a startup. As such, it operates more like “a structured monarchy,” as described in the book Zero to One, which is a kind of Machiavellian explainer on startups from venture capitalist and democracy-adversary Peter Thiel. Musk is becoming increasingly comfortable in the role of super-powerful authoritarian, in that model. He’s harassed Tesla whistleblowers for leaking to the media and is famously distrustful of the press. But Musk’s brand of arrogance goes from annoying to dangerous when it’s connected to actual battlefield outcomes. 

Last week, Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, said that Musk revealed to him that he was personally blocking the Ukrainians from using Starlink in Crimea, and that Musk had taken it upon himself to talk to Russian President Vladimir Putin about the war before floating his “peace plan.” Musk denied it. 

Musk’s authoritarian mindset might be a necessary ingredient to start an electric car company or design a new rocket engine. But authoritarianism applied to human beings, their sense of identity, home, justice, and being, is antithetical to democracy. We’re quickly arriving at a point where the cause of democracy in Ukraine—and next, perhaps, Taiwan—is beholden to the ill-informed opinions and personal grudges of a modern-day tyrant. Before they go any further with Musk or his companies, U.S. military and intelligence officials would be right reconsider how closely they want to rely on him to protect democracy in America.