Elon Musk is a technological genius, a successful entrepreneur, and a worrisome geopolitical force. He is fabulously wealthy, politically aggressive, erratic, and accountable to no one.
On Oct. 20, The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk personally ordered restrictions affecting SpaceX satellite communications used by Ukraine’s military drones, significantly impeding its military operations. Any time they flew faster than 100 miles an hour (161 kilometers per hour), the video feed cut out.
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Musk said he discussed the issue with White House officials, but US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he was unaware of prior discussions and that Musk and SpaceX made the decision.
But Musk has denied responsibility for the Starlink restrictions, while credible media outlets attributed the decision to him. This underscores the reality that a single businessman has inordinate power over life and death on a battlefield or in cities.
Culpability aside, this is unacceptable, as tech pioneer Bill Gates has warned: “The state – not the tech sector – must hold the ultimate authority over these potentially lethal systems.”
The world’s biggest hyperscalers are as powerful as nation-states.
The world cannot afford a future in which the fate of nations depends on the whims, political loyalties, or commercial calculations of a handful of billionaires. America’s tech giants are as powerful as nation-states financially, and wield political influence globally.
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Musk played a heroic role in Ukraine’s defense in February 2022 after the Russian invasion when he activated Starlink service and arranged deliveries of terminals. This prevented a catastrophe, but then months later he declined to extend Starlink coverage to support a Ukrainian attack against Russia’s Black Sea Fleet near Crimea. He did so at the urging of a Russian friend.
Now, this recent stoppage has undermined Ukraine’s defense.
The overriding issue is that a handful of tech businesses control five strategically essential choke points: communications, intelligence, weapons, computing power, and infrastructure. The danger is not technological power, but dependence on privately owned tech without sufficient democratic or legal oversight.
The world’s biggest hyperscalers are as powerful as nation-states. As just one measure, here are the biggest tech giants’ revenues compared to the GDP of certain countries:
In 2025, the combined gross revenue of Elon Musk’s primary technology companies – Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI (which absorbed X/Twitter) – reached approximately $116.7 billion, equivalent to Venezuela’s GDP.
These are the world’s six most powerful tech tycoons:
- Peter Thiel – Billionaire tech founder and right-wing political kingmaker who handpicked Musk and trained Vice President JD Vance. He co-founded Palantir Technologies, supplying data-mining, AI, and surveillance software to US defense agencies, intelligence networks, and immigration enforcement (ICE). He’s partnered with many Silicon Valley billionaires and was a co-founder with Musk of PayPal and other companies.
- Elon Musk – Communications and space. SpaceX operates Starlink, a vast constellation of satellites providing internet connectivity around the world. It also launches satellites and spacecraft for the Pentagon and intelligence agencies. Control over these systems creates extraordinary strategic leverage. Most worrisome to some is that his spaceflight company, SpaceX, has exclusive contracts with the US government worth billions and controls Starlink, thousands of satellites that provide internet access globally. This has become an important planetary infrastructure upon which millions of people depend.
- Alex Karp – Military intelligence. Karp and Peter Thiel own Palantir Technologies Inc., which develops sophisticated software that integrates battlefield intelligence, identifies threats, analyzes enormous datasets, and supports military targeting decisions. Such systems are essential to modern command structures.
- Palmer Luckey – Autonomous weapons. The founder of Anduril is transforming military procurement through drones, autonomous interceptors, surveillance networks, and other relatively inexpensive weapons systems.
- Jensen Huang – Artificial intelligence. NVIDIA supplies the advanced computing chips and infrastructure that enable AI systems. These technologies are essential to intelligence analysis, autonomous systems, advanced simulations, and the future of warfare.
- Jeff Bezos – Cloud computing and space infrastructure. Amazon Web Services provides critical cloud and data infrastructure to American defense and intelligence agencies, while Blue Origin develops launch vehicles and space systems with national-security applications.
Musk and other billionaires have also bought media outlets to gain oversized political influence. They donate staggering amounts to political campaigns, provide access to publicity, and hand out corporate favors and jobs.
Musk has aggressively waded into foreign politics.
Musk’s X has intervened aggressively in American and European political debates. Tech billionaires are buying newspapers, networks, and entertainment services to reshape public discourse, pivot into streaming and AI integration, and to project political or cultural influence.
This week, Senior White House adviser Peter Navarro warned that Fox Corp.’s proposed $22 billion acquisition of Roku (a major streaming service used by millions) could create a powerful streaming conglomerate capable of controlling what millions of Americans watch, which competing networks they can access, and how advertisers reach consumers.
Navarro, President Donald Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, called the proposed transaction a major antitrust threat.
“This is not just a merger; it is also a weapon,” he wrote.
Musk has aggressively waded into foreign politics. He endorsed Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), attacked Britain’s Labour government, amplified anti-immigration campaigners, and supported nationalist and populist political figures across Europe.
Musk has frequently targeted British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, called for early elections, amplified posts from anti-immigration figures like Tommy Robinson, and engaged with controversial Reform UK figures like Nigel Farage.
In France: Musk described National Rally figure Marine Le Pen as “France’s last hope” following legal troubles, drawing rebukes from French government officials who labeled the comments as foreign meddling. He has supported Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and criticized leaders in Spain and other European nations. Such interventions have provoked accusations of foreign electoral interference, but he claims he is simply challenging established political elites.
Such concentration of power leads to corruption, conflicts of interest in government procurement, political accountability issues, and national security vulnerabilities.
The US was the first nation to understand and tackle the danger of concentrated economic power with its antitrust laws decades ago – against the Rockefellers and Wall Street financiers. Today, however, AI giants get a free pass, and what will happen when a tech billionaire disagrees with American foreign policy or his commercial interests conflict with national-security priorities? What if an owner becomes politically aligned or fully controlled by a foreign government or ideology?
Public concern about tech increases, mostly concerning future job losses to AI as well as about the concentration of wealth in the hands of too few.
“The masters may be losing control of their creation.”
On Sept. 29, the world’s richest tech executives signed a White House Accord on Super Intelligence, an agreement to self-regulate one another with some government oversight. Trump gathered Silicon Valley’s A-list to combat the drumbeat of news stories about serious accidents, hacking incidents, children hunted by predators on social media, and suicides or shootings triggered by AI models that have run amok.
Critics and many AI experts demand government regulation, but the laissez-faire Trump regime doesn’t want to lose America’s technology lead over China, so it proposed self-regulation. Some cynically say this will accomplish nothing, but President Trump replied confidently: “They will police one another and bad actors will get nabbed.”
However, the majority of Americans and state governments want government regulations over the country’s technocracy in light of rogue incidents and warnings.
The father of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, put the need to take action bluntly: “The masters may be losing control of their creation... [They] can escape containment and conspire with each other, making them dangerous. So we should make them so they really care about us. And if we don’t do that, we’re toast.”
Reprinted with permission. Read the original here.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.