In 2015, after reading a book about how the telegraph created a sort of proto-internet that helped make various robber barons rich and powerful, I wrote an article about Elon Musk that, a decade later, feels both very embarrassing and somewhat prophetic. Musk and SpaceX had just announced a plan to launch a constellation of low-earth orbit, internet-providing satellites.
I saw this at the time as a step toward a kind of everything company. SpaceX was working on reusable rockets that would drastically lower the cost of flying things to space, and I imagined at the time that, if successful, being able to fly things to space for a far lower cost than his competitors would give Musk incredible power and wealth. This was in part because of SpaceX’s potential ability to become a telecom company in addition to a space launch company.
“If he can successfully develop the reusable launch vehicles, that gives him a tremendous dominance over the mode of getting to space. Once you can do it relatively cheaply and in high volume, instead of launching five or six times a year, you’re launching [and] putting stuff into orbit once a week. That’s the hard part,” Marco Caceres, a space industry analyst, told me at the time. “All the other stuff is really dessert, in a way. It’s the satellites, the services that’ll make you the real money.” SpaceX said at the time that Starlink would have 4,000 satellites. Today, it has more than 9,000 satellites, and the majority of all satellites in space have been launched by SpaceX and are owned by SpaceX.
I imagined a world in which SpaceX essentially became a telecom company in addition to being a space company, and the type of power that would give Musk. A decade later, at least this part is more or less coming to pass. SpaceX is a company that has been extremely boosted by tax breaks, subsidies, and government contracts. It also has become critical, quasi-governmental infrastructure not just for the United States but for companies around the world. And Starlink itself now essentially has a monopoly on fast internet access in rural areas, on boats, in conflict areas, and, increasingly, on airplanes. Starlink is very much a real thing—an international flight I was on recently had free Starlink internet and it felt like half of the plane spent most of the flight on video calls.
My article from 2015 is full of Musk boosterism that makes me embarrassed now, and Musk promises things every five minutes that are either wildly overhyped by the media, never happen, or happen on much longer timescales than expected. But the article was directionally accurate: SpaceX figured out how to launch rockets routinely and inexpensively, and it is now wildly powerful because of this. Starlink exists because it is easy for SpaceX to put satellites in space, and Musk’s unfettered access to low-Earth orbit has allowed him to literally dominate a space (sorry) that should be shared by all of humanity.
SpaceX has always been a political project, one in which Musk seeks to colonize space, expand his bloodline, and/or become god emperor of the universe. It is perhaps his most political project. And yet, of his companies, it has flown under the radar as an explicitly political project because Musk has been so goddamned annoying, destructive, and fascistic on X and within the federal government. SpaceX, meanwhile, has always been the most competently run of his companies, and is one that under Gwynne Shotwell’s leadership had, til now, largely not been fucked with by Musk in the ways that Tesla, Twitter, and xAI have been.
That’s not to say Musk hasn’t meddled at all: He ordered the shutdown of Starlink in Ukraine in the early days of Russia’s war there, and literally this week the company announced he would crack down on Russia’s use of Starlink for drones. That this company and this man have this power at all highlights my point: Starlink, and SpaceX, have become geopolitically important in ways that most people have not thought about, that we have not grappled with, and that the Trump administration is almost definitely not going to do anything about.
And so it feels both important and quite alarming that SpaceX is acquiring xAI in what appears to be a highly complex financial scheme that I cannot even begin to pretend to understand. Musk’s announcement of this deal, which appears to have been the result of a protracted “negotiation” between himself, is batshit crazy, first of all: “SpaceX has acquired xAI to form the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform. This marks not just the next chapter, but the next book in SpaceX and xAI's mission: scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars!”
Musk goes on to say that SpaceX and xAI will launch “a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers,” and signs off “thank you for everything you have done and will do for the light cone of consciousness.”
There are many reasons that “AI data centers in space” may be a pipe dream and may not happen, but what he is proposing is a magnitude of space junk that no other company could plausibly promise to launch. Data centers or not, SpaceX is now dominating low-Earth orbit in a way no other company or country has. While Musk has been gutting the federal government, interfering in elections, allowing people to generate CSAM, engaging in white supremacy, planning trips to Epstein’s island, implanting chips into people’s brains, siphoning off taxpayer money to build ridiculous tunnels, giving his sperm to whoever will take it, turning his cars into experimental robot taxis, and pretending to build humanoid robots, SpaceX has somewhat (?) quietly colonized and dominated low earth orbit.
Musk has taken this space for his own use, concerns about light pollution, satellite collisions, and telecom monopolies be damned. This has always been concerning, but explicitly intertwining the aspirations and fate of SpaceX with Musk’s CSAM generating social media website, his AI bullshit machines, and his right wing political project is horrifying and monopolistic. What happens next, I have no idea.
