‘Everything Is Subservient to the Big Guy’: Fiona Hill on Trump and America’s Emerging Oligarchy
The longtime Russia expert explains why Elon Musk, Vladmir Putin and Donald Trump are all talking to each other.
The news of the past few weeks has included some developments that on their own could seem minor: Since he left office, Donald Trump has held a half-dozen phone calls with Vladimir Putin. Elon Musk is also talking regularly to the Russian leader. A couple of newspaper owners decided their newspapers’ editorial boards shouldn’t make an endorsement in the presidential election.
[…]
Understandably, for Musk, he’s hoping to get something out of Trump, out of Trump’s success in the elections in terms of his own businesses. But he’s also hoping to get something out of Putin as well. For Elon Musk, for Starlink and also for SpaceX, he needs access to terrestrial relay stations across the whole of the planet, including Russia and China and all of the larger territories. He needs to make sure that his satellite systems — and most of the satellites in orbit at this particular point belong to Starlink — that they’re not held at risk by hostile powers like a China or Russia. We’ve seen that Russia has the capacity to destroy satellites in space and avoiding this outcome is Musk’s bottom line in his interests.
