Luke Hartley realized how important Elon Musk's Starlink was to him when it fell overboard. Two weeks into his voyage across the Pacific in October 2023, Hartley's sailboat, Songbird, was hit by an intense squall that knocked the Starlink dish balanced on the front of the boat over the side. It was a major blow for the music teacher turned sailing influencer, who tells me he made far more money posting about his three-year voyage around the world on TikTok via Starlink than he ever had in the US education system. Without satellite internet, he had no way to upload the videos that were funding his voyage, check weather forecasts, or call his family. From the remote Pacific to the front lines of Ukraine, Starlink's network of orbital internet satellites has become indispensable to 13 million people in more than 167 countries.

Starlink accounted for more than 60% of the $18.6 billion in revenue SpaceX generated last year, and was the only part of the business to turn a profit. Musk has grander ambitions for the flying crown jewels in his empire. The company plans to launch tens of thousands more satellites in the coming years as it targets new markets, in a push to transform Starlink from a boutique service for rugged survivalists into the world's premier wireless carrier and broadband provider. Beyond the profits, Starlink has also provided Musk a vital source of influence and soft power that stretches the globe. The world's richest man's attempt to gut government bureaucracy with DOGE, his massive political donations, and his erratic and incendiary posting habits on X have cost him Tesla customers and inspired boycotts and protests against his other companies. But Starlink is so useful in far-flung and war-torn places — and has so few alternatives — that it has granted Musk a rare level of immunity to political gravity.

It's also left governments, adventurers, and digital nomads struggling to reconcile their reliance on the technology with the controversies that swirl around Musk. "We can criticize Musk till the cows come home, but it's an incredible product," says Hartley, who has mixed feelings about depending so heavily on Starlink. "It has a very controversial name behind it, but it is also a way for me to talk to my mom and inspire folks.

Both things can be true." Nowhere is this dance between reluctance and reliance more delicately choreographed than in Ukraine, where Starlink has been essential in the war against Russia.

Starlink satellites have been widely adopted across the Ukrainian military as a comms system that cannot be hacked or jammed by Russian radio warfare. The service has allowed ground teams to adapt their targets mid-mission and remotely control drones with flawless video almost to the moment of impact, with no need for giant antennas that could reveal their position. The technological advantage has come at the price of giving a mercurial CEO the power to tilt the balance of the war. In 2023, Musk sparked global headlines when he revealed he refused a request to activate Starlink to assist a Ukrainian assault on Crimea because he was concerned that "SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war." The billionaire also threatened to stop supplying Ukraine with Starlink terminals the year prior over a funding dispute, and Reuters reported last July that he jeopardized a 2022 Ukrainian counteroffensive by cutting Starlink access to frontline troops. Musk did not respond to the report, but he previously said in a March 2025 X post that he would never turn off Ukrainian terminals or use the threat of doing so as a bargaining chip, no matter how much he disagreed with the country's government.

More recently, Musk has given Ukraine an edge. In February of this year, SpaceX clamped down on Russian forces' illicit use of Starlink terminals after Ukraine's then-defense minister made a personal appeal to Musk. The cutoff severely disrupted Russia's military and allowed Ukraine to retake valuable territory. Some servicemembers and researchers say Ukraine's dependent yet unstable relationship with Starlink leaves them uneasy. "If you are military and you're operating a drone, you cannot rely on something unpredictable. All the systems should be under control," says one drone pilot and sergeant in Ukraine's unmanned brigades.

"But we have no alternative right now," he adds. Alessio Terzi, an assistant professor at the University of Cambridge's Bennett School of Public Policy, tells me that governments risk entering a "Faustian pact" with Musk that would see the billionaire decide how, when, and where its citizens and militaries access the internet. He said that the closest analogy for this level of geopolitical power is not pre-war titans of industry like Henry Ford and Thomas Edison but the East India Company, the British trading conglomerate that ruled over much of the Indian subcontinent.

The company was granted exclusive rights to operate the trade routes between Asia and Britain in 1600. It leveraged that monopoly to grow into a quasi-empire with its own system of taxation and standing army that ruled over millions for nearly three centuries. Terzi says that SpaceX's market share of everything sent into space — close to 80% in 2025 — outstrips the East India Company's share of global shipping at its peak. He adds that Musk and SpaceX are leveraging their own monopoly over satellite communication to act more like a sovereign state than a private company.

"This is a mega-company that is chipping away at some roles that would normally fall on the government," says Terzi. When Musk first announced plans for Starlink in 2015, launching internet satellites was an ambitious side quest.

At the time, SpaceX's main mission was to lower the cost of launching cargo into space by perfecting its Falcon rocket, which could be partially reused over multiple flights rather than self-destructing on impact. One former SpaceX employee said that SpaceX initially based its Starlink division in Redmond, Washington, in part to avoid distracting employees working on Falcon at the company's main facilities in Texas and California. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.

By 2020, however, Starlink was at the center of SpaceX's plans. That year, Musk suggested the satellite internet service could become a $30 billion-a-year cash cow. The company spun up a production line for Starlink user terminals in a corner of its Hawthorne, California, facility that was so far away from the main campus that early employees bought bikes to travel from one side to the other. The bikes were regularly stolen, another former employee said.

In typical SpaceX fashion, the production line quickly expanded, the former employee said, so much so that it spilled out into unfinished buildings with compacted dirt floors. Musk took a hands-on approach to the project, the person added, including telling employees to contact him if they encountered any roadblocks and providing technical feedback on new versions of the terminal. "If his internet was down, then we were in trouble," the former employee said.

In Starlink's early days, Musk framed it as an effort to "rebuild the internet" into a space-based network that would eliminate lag while reaching the estimated 42 million Americans with no access to broadband internet. It had the added bonus, Musk said, of providing a steady stream of revenue to pay for SpaceX's Mars colonization efforts. Musk's rivals are also chasing this vision.

Jeff Bezos' Amazon and Paris-based Eutelsat OneWeb have attempted to build their own satellite constellations, but the dominance of SpaceX's rocket business — the company launched its Falcon 9 rocket 165 times last year, more rockets than the rest of the world combined — gives it a steep advantage. When Amazon put 24 of its Project Kuiper (now Leo) satellites into orbit last October, they traveled on a SpaceX rocket.

Recently, Musk has gone from describing Starlink as cheap internet for rural communities to something more fundamental: an oxygen source for an AI-saturated world. In SpaceX's August 2026 earnings call, Musk speculated that demand for Starlink would skyrocket as it became the connectivity network for fleets of robotaxis and armies of humanoid robots. (Tesla has already begun outfitting its Cybercab robotaxis with Starlink dishes.)

Beyond the financial success Starlink has afforded Musk, it has also become a useful tool for him and SpaceX to generate positive headlines. The company regularly offers Starlink for free in countries hit by natural disasters and it waived fees for Starlink access in Iran during a government crackdown on protests. SpaceX has also used Starlink discounts to defuse the data center backlash that has spread across the US. The rocket giant's Colossus data centers in Memphis and nearby Southaven, Mississippi, have attracted opposition and lawsuits from local residents complaining about noise and pollution from the gas generators powering the sites.

SpaceX responded in June by offering residents in Memphis 50% off Starlink for their "partnership and support." SpaceX extended the same offer to residents of rural Vermilion Parish in Louisiana, where it is building a $100 billion spaceport that will eventually support thousands of Starship flights a year. Musk's ambitions for the service are growing more galactic.

In SpaceX's August earnings call, he predicted that Starlink could provide the majority of the world's internet within the next 10 years. One area where Starlink has already become a must-have is in the air. Executives said on the call that in-flight WiFi powered by Starlink, which has been adopted by more than 40 airlines, has become so popular that some passengers — including YouTube influencer Mr Beast — are booking short-haul flights instead of going direct because they have Starlink.

The satellite internet service has become a major selling point for airlines that offer it and a headache for those who don't. United Airlines has used its Starlink in-flight WiFi to try and woo Delta loyalty flyers, after Delta picked Amazon's Leo for its fleet. SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell signaled on the call that the company plans to turn its mobile service into a full-fledged mobile carrier that will aggressively target AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile.

"I anticipate us to be able to acquire quite a few of their customers because I think our service will be better," she said. To take on the telecoms, SpaceX is planning to fill the heavens with a lot more Starlink satellites. The company has submitted proposals to regulators to launch 100,000 of its V3 Starlink satellites, which are larger units that can only be launched on SpaceX's massive Starship rocket. Analysts say that this proliferation won't be enough to take on the likes of AT&T.

Tim Farrar, president at technology consultancy TMF Associates, tells me that while low-earth orbit satellites are great at providing coverage to remote and rural areas, they struggle to provide service in densely populated cities. As they whiz around the planet at 17,000 miles an hour, Starlink's satellites spend a small fraction of their time in orbit over these areas, and far more time crossing large uninhabited expanses of ocean and wilderness.

Pierre Lionnet, a space economist, says that as the company launches more satellites to try to meet rising demand in urban areas, the amount of capacity being wasted will increase, shrinking SpaceX's margins. "The problem of growing this capacity is that it means that the same satellite will spend a larger amount of time circling the earth in areas where there is no additional demand," he says. Lionnet estimates that the company would be unlikely to turn a profit on a 100,000-strong network of Starlink satellites at the current cost of launching cargo into orbit.

SpaceX is working hard to bring that cost down with Starship, its most advanced rocket, which executives estimate will reduce launch costs by 10 times compared to the Falcon 9. In September, SpaceX hit a major milestone for Starship when it deployed working Starlink V3 satellites into orbit for the first time. Until Starship can ramp up to full commercial operation, SpaceX will face pressure to maximize revenue from the satellite capacity they do have, Lionnet says.

That means adding new enterprise customers, such as governments and airlines, and launching Starlink in new countries. Global expansion gives Musk new soft power opportunities, but also risks entangling other parts of his business empire in geopolitics. Following the example of Ukraine and the US government — for which SpaceX has built Starshield, a secure military version of Starlink — other nations are looking closely at Starlink for military purposes.

In July, Taiwan changed foreign ownership rules that previously collapsed negotiations with SpaceX to bring Starlink to the island nation. Phoebe Pham, a researcher at Taiwan's state-backed Institute for National Defense and Security Research, says that low-earth orbit satellite internet networks like Starlink would be critical for the country in the event of a conflict with China, which views Taiwan as a breakaway province.

Some military analysts have predicted that in an assault on Taiwan, China would likely cut the undersea cables that provide internet to the island and launch a barrage of cyberattacks against the island's communications infrastructure. For the Taiwanese government, Starlink would provide a backup network for military and civilian comms that would be exceptionally hard for China to jam. "It would be wrong to say they're not looking at lessons learned from Ukraine," Pham says. In Taiwan, government approval or adoption of Starlink could be complicated by Musk's business interests in China and his previous comments about Taiwanese independence. He suggested in 2022 that the island become a "special administrative zone" similar to Hong Kong and described Taiwan as an "integral part" of China in 2023.

Tesla has operated a giant EV factory in Shanghai since 2019, and around a fifth of the automaker's revenue last year came from the Chinese market. Pham says that if Starlink applied to operate in Taiwan, the government would have to weigh the risk that Musk's business interests in China could be used as "potential leverage." It could seek to avoid giving Musk the kind of unilateral decision-making power he has enjoyed in Ukraine, she added. "The question is, who makes these decisions about the activation and coverage?" she says.

Starlink has also run into geopolitical roadblocks in India. In June, Bloomberg reported that officials hit the brakes on the service's long-awaited launch after raising concerns over reports from local Iranian media that Starlink kits were being used in Iran, despite a state-mandated block on internet access during the conflict with the US and Israel. SpaceX executive Lauren Dreyer said in response to Bloomberg's report that the company remained in "active and productive discussions" about bringing Starlink to India, adding that SpaceX had set up a bespoke deployment model for operating Starlink in the country.

Ukraine is now exploring alternative methods for frontline communications. A senior figure at a company manufacturing drones for the country's military says Ukraine is planning for the day Starlink goes offline, whether because Musk has pulled the plug or as a result of direct Russian attacks on Starlink's satellites. "Hopefully, it will not happen tomorrow. But if it happens in a year, Ukraine will be ready," the person says. "Every army should prepare for this scenario because it's not just a question if Elon Musk will shut it down. In the military, you always need to have backup options for connectivity. Otherwise, you may lose everything."