Elon Musk's influence over first Tesla (TSLA) and now SpaceX (SPCX) has long been measured in terms of corporate valuations, technological breakthroughs, and personal wealth, where his companies have made him the richest person in the world. Across the last few years, however, the centi-billionaire's growing portfolio of businesses has pushed him into a new lane entirely.
Over the past decade, Elon Musk has become far more than a corporate executive or political power broker. Through his control of companies underpinning global communications, military operations, space access, and artificial intelligence, Musk has acquired a degree of influence over national security, international relations, and the global economy that few private individuals have ever possessed.
"There's a very real chance that [Musk] is the most powerful civilian, non-governmental actor in history," Gautam Mukunda, a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and managing director of the consultancy Two Rivers Group. Musk "has resources that are vastly larger than those of all but a handful of governments on the planet."
That influence came into sharp focus this month when widely reported restrictions on SpaceX's satellite communications services disrupted Ukraine's military operations, exposing just how dependent a sovereign nation's battlefield capabilities had become on infrastructure supplied by a private-sector company.
There are conflicting accounts of who ordered the restrictions in Ukraine, which disrupted battlefield drones and prompted several hours of faltering drone speeds and faulty communications on the front lines of the nation's conflict with Russia. Musk says the White House controls Ukraine's access to Starshield, a military-grade version of Starlink funded by the Pentagon, while officials in the Trump administration have said they weren't involved in the decision.
Starshield systems are owned and controlled by the US government. Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 14, 2026
Starlink is a commercial service owned and controlled by SpaceX. Usage of Starlink is limited to civilian or defensive activities…
Regardless of responsibility, the incident has highlighted the increasing separation between corporate access to governments and governmental reliance on the private sector, particularly given Musk's singular control over rocketry and satellite communications.
'Extraordinary power'
SpaceX is now responsible for roughly 90% of all mass sent into orbit off Earth, Musk said on SpaceX's recent earnings call. The Pentagon is Starshield's largest customer, while countries such as the Philippines, Argentina, and Indonesia use Starlink for national communications, including emergency services.
"He can turn a country's communications on or off — that's an extraordinary power," Darrell West, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's Center for Technology Innovation, told Yahoo Finance. "Even governments can't do that."
To be sure, Musk is far from the only corporate leader to have garnered significant political power.CEOs of the largest banks in the world, like JPMorgan Chase's (JPM) Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs' (GS) David Solomon, have repeatedly spoken with or alongside the US president. Oil and gas majors like ExxonMobil (XOM) under Darren Woods and Chevron (CVX) under Mike Wirth have made deals with war-torn nations such as Libya and Iraq in search of cheap and sizeable fossil fuel deposits.
Perhaps most visibly over the last year, Silicon Valley's largest leaders have become increasingly common sights in Washington, D.C., attending dinners and state summits at the White House and pushing AI legislation in the halls of Congress. When Trump hosted China's Xi Jinping at the White House in late September, Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang, OpenAI's (OPAI.PVT) Sam Altman, Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella, and Amazon (AMZN) CEO Jeff Bezos were all in attendance alongside Musk.
But Musk's dominance across several industries critical to national security — including but not limited to space communications, rocketry, and advanced robotics — have placed him in a singular category of corporate-driven geopolitical power.
More broadly, the Starlink-Ukraine fallout underscores a broader transformation underway in the global economy: Technologies once controlled, developed, or operated primarily by governments are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small number of corporations, giving their executives considerable influence over international affairs.
The US government has the capacity for major strategic projects, such as the invention of the atomic bomb through the Manhattan Project in the 1940s or the first moon landing in 1969. Yet the state has instead chosen to outsource much of that ability to private corporations that have garnered immense power and reliance, Adam Segal, the Council on Foreign Relations' Ira A. Lipman Chair in Emerging Technologies and National Security, told Yahoo Finance.
"There are probably some national security areas where we want to ensure that NASA can still do this, but I think that's going to be pretty narrow," Segal said.
He added, "The idea that the Pentagon and the government more broadly is just going to be reliant on commercial tech because it's going to be the most advanced, that is going to be very hard to put back in the bottle."
Musk's growing state-adjacent power also comes as geopolitics have begun to play an increasingly visible role in market performance, driving everything from oil prices and global sovereign debt yields to Big Tech equity performance.
The war in Iran has disrupted global energy flows and pushed up inflation across developed economies; protests in France have depressed bond prices across the eurozone; Nvidia's reliance on chips from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM) has thrust increasingly fractious relations between Beijing and Taipei back into the spotlight.
The Ukraine-Russia war, where Musk has been most visibly in focus, has directly contributed to the diesel price crisis facing the US. The disruptions to the Ukrainian military's use of Starshield come as the White House has offered the Kremlin incentives and concessions that have included allowing the sale of Russian energy products on the open market, breaking with years of US sanctions on Moscow.
"2026 has seen economists and strategists forced to accept that geopolitics, rather than being the odd exogenous shock, is a structural backdrop disrupting models and markets," Rabobank global strategist Michael Every said. "Changing politics can also change markets."
For investors in SpaceX and Tesla, geopolitics — and Musk's influence over some of the most critical global developments — have become an increasingly large part of the Musk story, at times eclipsing the traditional financial metrics used to judge the performance of a corporate executive.
Teams inside SpaceX and Tesla are reportedly pursuing an aggressive timeline to merge the two companies before the 2028 presidential election while friendly faces remain in the White House. Senator Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) said Thursday that Congress should issue subpoenas to Elon Musk, Starlink/SpaceX, and the Department of Defense over interference in Ukraine.
Musk responded publicly to reports of a potential investigation on Wednesday.
"Live by the sword, die by the sword," Musk said on X. "Those who pick fights with me should understand that I will find out who is really pulling the strings and come for them, not just their puppets."
Follow Jake Conley on X @byjakeconley or email him at jake.conley@yahooinc.com.
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This article originally appeared on Yahoo Finance at https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/article/how-elon-musk-went-from-tesla-ceo-to-the-most-powerful-civilian-non-governmental-actor-in-history-100000227.html