Elon Musk Has the ‘Off’ Switch

Since Starlink first beamed down to Brazil two years ago, hundreds of communities in the Amazon that were previously off the grid found themselves connected to the rest of the world. Here was the purest promise of SpaceX’s satellite internet—to provide connectivity in even the most remote places on Earth—fulfilled. Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, received a medal from the Brazilian government. But now Starlink’s Brazilian service is tangled in a mess of political tensions, court orders, personal insults, and threats to revoke the company’s license to operate in the country. And this drama all started because of another Musk business that links strangers around the globe: X, née Twitter.

For months, X and Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes have been publicly feuding over Moraes’s order that X suspend dozens of user accounts, including many belonging to right-wing politicians and pundits, as part of what the judge has called a campaign against online disinformation. Musk has largely ignored the demands, accusing de Moraes of censoring conservative voices. He kept ignoring it even as the court levied fines against X and froze Starlink’s Brazilian financial assets in an attempt to pressure any Musk-owned company to pay the penalties. The fight reached a boil in recent days, when de Moraes instructed internet providers in Brazil to cut off access to X altogether and Musk refused to block the site on Starlink until the latter business got its accounts back.

In some ways, this is classic Musk, scuffling with government agencies when he believes they’re infringing on his enterprises. “What a scumbag!” Musk posted about de Moraes yesterday, after Starlink reversed course and agreed to block X (and pursue legal action over the locked assets). But in other ways, the debacle is a microcosm of fraught, ongoing debates over free speech and internet regulation around the world. Musk isn’t the clear villain here: His actions could be seen as a necessary corrective to government overreach. But they seem less magnanimous when you consider that the alternative to government overreach is, apparently, a World Wide Web governed by the whims of the world’s richest man.

This particular feud has crystallized an unsettling truth that is growing more apparent each day: Musk is becoming an internet god. Space-based internet and social media are a potent combination, and their control by a single person is quite unprecedented—and alarming in the same manner as a federal government restricting online speech via sweeping decree. Not only can Musk now determine who gains traction on a small but influential corner of the web; in certain corners of the globe, he can also determine who has access to the internet at all, and regulate what people encounter when they use it.

[Renée DiResta: Elon Musk is fighting for attention, not free speech]

For a service that took off only about five years ago, Starlink has become impressively ubiquitous, available for use on all seven continents. Musk dispatched terminals to places reeling from natural disasters, and then to the front lines of war. When Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, it hacked the satellite provider that the Ukrainian military relied on for communications. Ukrainian officials appealed to Musk for help, and SpaceX dispatched truckloads of Starlink terminals to the besieged country, for free. Soon, Musk found himself with immense decision-making power, as Ukrainian authorities pleaded with him to activate Starlink over a port city in Crimea, apparently so that they could conduct a surprise drone attack on the Russian fleet anchored there. By the end of the war’s first year, when SpaceX no longer wanted to foot the bill for Starlink operations, the Pentagon jumped to take over the job before SpaceX could cut off access. As one undersecretary told The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow, “Even though Musk is not technically a diplomat or statesman, I felt it was important to treat him as such, given the influence he had on this issue.”

Last year, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hosted Musk for a visit, the billionaire looked—and played—the part of a world leader traveling to a war zone. He toured a kibbutz that Hamas had attacked, dressed in a suit instead of his trademark Occupy Mars T-shirt, and offered Starlink’s services to the Israeli government. Israel has imposed internet blackouts and destroyed telecommunications infrastructure in Gaza, a common tactic in modern warfare. This summer, after lengthy negotiations, Israeli authorities allowed SpaceX to activate Starlink in one hospital in Gaza, with more service on the way. The deal resembled agreements between Israel and other world powers for humanitarian aid, but as far as we know, the United States, where SpaceX is registered, did not send Musk to the Middle East to broker it. He flew over on his private jet.

Starlink is what’s known in the satellite business as a megaconstellation. At the time of this writing—and that’s important to note, because SpaceX launches a fresh batch nearly every week—more than 6,000 operational Starlink satellites are circling Earth, accounting for more than half of all functioning satellites in orbit. (As I’ve written before, if any aliens stopped by low-Earth orbit, they would think this planet belonged to SpaceX.) Starlink has grown so large in part because SpaceX is simply the most prolific space company in the world. Other companies are working on their own internet constellations, including Amazon, but they’re lagging far behind—and none of their leaders owns prominent social-media companies, where they can govern the flow of information.

[Read: Private companies are building an exoskeleton around Earth]

Compared with SpaceX, the world’s town square, as Musk calls X, is a cauldron of chaos, especially for users. Since Musk took over Twitter, he has made it a cozy home for far-right provocateurs, reinstated the accounts of previously banned bad actors, promoted conspiracy theories, and made the website worse at separating fact from fiction. And yet, Musk believes that X is the “number 1 source of news in the world.” For a part of the world that relies on Starlink, Musk could, if he wanted, make it the only news source.

The Brazil fiasco may have led to Musk backing down, but it has also revealed just how easily he can serve Starlink users whatever content he may want. Musk’s fame, the omnipresence of his many businesses, and his growing attention to politics does not automatically translate to foreign-policy expertise. But what could Brazil—or any nation—really do to curb his control? Pummel Starlink out of the sky? Impossible; as David Burbach, a professor of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, once told me, “Nobody has enough anti-satellite weapons to come anywhere near shooting that down.”

[Read: One satellite crash could upend modern life]

And Starlink, which currently operates in 75 countries, is only getting bigger. A new batch of satellites went up today. SpaceX has already received approval from U.S. regulators to launch thousands more, and soon SpaceX may start launching Starlinks in even greater quantities on its giant new rocket, Starship. Musk envisions as many as 42,000 satellites orbiting Earth someday. In the next few years, more people than ever may find themselves subject to Musk’s decisions when they’re doing something as simple as sending an email. The exoskeleton of Starlink satellites surrounding Earth, invisible from the ground, will feel almost palpable, shifting with the whims of the richest person in the world, who controls it all.