The Private Sovereign: How Elon Musk Built Unprecedented Military and Civil Power

Sometime in the night between October 13 and 14, Ukrainian drone crews noticed that their aircraft were going quiet. Not all of them, and not everywhere. Only the fast ones. Hardware moving faster than about 100 miles an hour, 160 kilometers per hour, was losing its satellite link, according to Serhii Beskrestnov, a defense-technology adviser to Ukraine’s president.¹ By October 17, President Volodymyr Zelensky put it bluntly: “The maximum speed today is 161 km/h; after exceeding it, Starlink shuts down, and we lose the drone.”¹

No army had voted on that number. No parliament had debated it. It arrived as a software setting, and it arrived from a company owned by one man.

The geopolitical kill-switch

The terminals in question were Starshield, the military and government version of SpaceX’s Starlink service, mounted on drones and vehicles.¹ The speed cap mattered because of what Ukraine uses them to hunt. Russia’s jet-powered Shahed drones can fly at roughly 370 kilometers per hour, and Ukraine’s interceptor drones have to chase them. Ukrainian sources say the link needs to hold at 450 kilometers per hour or more to do that job.¹ Some units reported dropouts at even lower speeds: the 7th Rapid Response Corps described 10- to 20-second losses at 110 to 120 km/h, and one activist, citing military reports, claimed drops at 60 to 70 km/h, a figure that has not been independently confirmed.¹

Who decided? That depends on whom you ask, and the answers do not agree. Musk wrote on X that “any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately” the president, and that Starshield systems are “owned and controlled by the US government.”² Reuters, citing two U.S. officials and a Western official, reported that the order came from inside the White House.¹ The Telegraph, citing four sources, reported that Musk proposed the caps and President Trump approved them.¹ On October 20, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing American officials, that Musk himself gave the order.³ Secretary of State Marco Rubio called reports of a White House order “categorically false.” Trump said: “It wasn’t me, and I don’t think it was Elon.”¹

It is not the first time. In 2022, Ukraine discovered that Starlink coverage had been geofenced near the Crimean coast before a planned naval-drone attack; when it asked for coverage to be switched on, Musk refused. (His biographer Walter Isaacson later corrected an early account that Musk had switched service offmid-attack: it had never been on.)⁴ In February 2026, the switch flipped the other way, when SpaceX helped Ukraine build a whitelist of registered terminals that cut off Russian forces who had been using Starlink.⁵ In 2025, Musk had promised that “Starlink will never turn off its terminals.”²

The question is not whether a switch was flipped for good or ill. It is that a switch exists, and that one company holds it.

Countries have always relied on contractors for weapons. What is new is a contractor whose product is not a rifle that, once sold, belongs to the buyer, but a live service that can be reshaped overnight from a console thousands of miles from the front. Poland paid for tens of thousands of the terminals Ukraine uses.¹ Its foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, asked Musk publicly whether he was “playing politics with your products again,” and warned that European customers were “watching.”²

Rockets on the asphalt: the Roadster benchmark

The next day, and a world away, Tesla rolled out a very different kind of power. On October 15, at its unveiling of the long-promised second-generation Roadster, a car with no one aboard launched itself over a line of parked Teslas on cold-gas thrusters developed with SpaceX, rolled in midair and landed.⁶ Another car drove up a half-circle ramp, clung upside down at the top using suction fans, then fired its thrusters to flip upright. Tesla claims a 0 to 60 mph time of about 0.81 seconds, a manufacturer figure that has not been independently measured.⁶

Tesla says the flying version, called Rocket, is “not approved for public road use,” and Aviation Week expects the thruster-equipped Thrust model to face regulatory hurdles over its gas plume.⁶ As transportation, it is a curiosity. As communication, it is precise. Daniel Kahneman showed that people often answer a hard question by quietly substituting an easier one. “Who should we trust with critical technology?” is hard. “Who can make a car fly?” is easy, vivid and on video. A demonstration like this does not need to be practical to be persuasive. It only needs to be unforgettable.

The bureaucratic nexus: DOGE

If Starshield showed Musk’s reach abroad, the Department of Government Efficiency showed it at home. Created by executive order in January 2025, DOGE placed Musk-aligned staff inside federal agencies. Within weeks, two of them had access to a Treasury system that processes a large share of federal payments. One, a 25-year-old engineer who had previously worked at X and SpaceX, resigned in February after the Wall Street Journal linked him to racist posts.⁷ The Justice Department told a court their access was read-only.⁷ Courts first blocked, then partly restored, that access.⁸

At the Social Security Administration, the fight went to the Supreme Court. On June 6, 2025, the justices lifted a lower-court order and let DOGE staff access agency records, which include Social Security numbers, earnings histories and bank details, while the case continued. Three justices dissented.⁹ That August, the agency’s chief data officer, Charles Borges, filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that DOGE had created a copy of the country’s master Social Security file on a cloud server lacking proper security oversight. The agency said it was not aware of any compromise; Borges later resigned.¹⁰

Musk left his government role at the end of May 2025. But for months, the head of one of the federal government’s most important space contractors had sat inside the machinery that pays, audits and keeps records on the rest of government, including agencies that regulate and buy from his companies.

The monopolist era

Put the pieces side by side. One person leads the company that launches much of the world’s satellite traffic, operates the largest satellite internet network, builds a widely used electric car and a major line of grid batteries, and in 2025 helped direct a federal cost-cutting operation with access to the government’s most sensitive data. Each role, on its own, has a defensible logic. Together, they describe something that political theory does not have a good word for: a private actor with some of the reach of a state, and none of its accountability.

Walter Isaacson’s portrait of Musk is of a man who thrives on risk and resents constraint. Those are useful traits in someone trying to land a rocket. They are more worrying in someone whose settings decide whether a drone reaches its target. The lesson of October 2026 is not about one decision, whoever made it. It is about dependency. When a country’s air defense, a continent’s battlefield communications and a government’s data pipelines all run through one company, the most important question is no longer what that company can build. It is who gets to say no to it.

For more from the Pierce Newsroom on how technology reshapes power and attention, read The Convenience Trap.