Elon Musk, Trump’s private citizen war lord?
A unilateral decision to provide satellite internet in Iran could change the dynamic.
By Jeff Nesbit
President Donald Trump’s top military advisers said Sunday that its strikes against three of Iran’s nuclear sites over the weekend aren’t a declaration of war against Iran and that the United States is not seeking regime change by directly aligning with Israel’s war aims in the region.
“This mission was not, has not been about regime change,” Trump’s Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, said at a rare news conference Sunday morning. Hegseth maintained that the United States was only directly attacking Iran’s nuclear program.
The problem is that Iran does not see it that way. “The United States ... opted for a dangerous military operation and aggression against the people of Iran,” Iran’s Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, said Sunday.
Trump’s staunchest allies in Congress don’t see it that way either. They believe Trump’s military actions aligned with Israel’s efforts to bring down Iran’s government. (Trump said later Sunday that regime change wouldn’t be bad.)
Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) spoke with Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, on Sunday. “He (Netanyahu) wanted me to urge the Iranian people to end this madness, take this regime down,” Graham said Sunday.
So, what is the clearest signal that America is now aligned with Israel’s war aim to force regime change in Iran? It likely came from Elon Musk, the world’s richest man with close, if fraying, ties to Trump. Musk made a unilateral decision that could drag the United States squarely into the middle of the Israel-Iran military conflict.
Earlier this month, Musk decided to use his Starlink satellite service as a tool for regime change in Iran.
Starlink moved to provide broadband-by-satellite service to the Iranian people, possibly propelling the United States into a shooting war with Iran.
Here’s the backdrop:
After Israel launched a pre-emptive strike against Iran’s military leadership, its top scientists, and nuclear facilities capable of quickly creating weapons-grade nuclear materials, Iran’s political leadership shut down the internet to mute public or online discussions about regime change.
“In view of the special conditions of the country, temporary restrictions have been imposed on the country's internet,” Iran's communications ministry announced after Israel began bombing Tehran and other parts of the country two weeks ago.
The Iranian ministry said the blackout will remain in place until normalcy returns, effectively cutting off millions from digital communication.
Shortly after that decision, Musk announced publicly that he had activated Starlink service in Iran.
“The beams are on,” he wrote in a post on X. Musk was responding to Mark Levin, a member of Trump's Homeland Security Advisory Council (and, like so many others driving political and even policy discussions in this White House, a Fox News personality).
In his own post on X, the social media platform Musk also owns, Levin had asked Musk to help “put the final nail in the coffin of the Iranian regime by providing Starlink to the Iranian people.”
Musk’s decision to use Starlink in Iran did not go unnoticed in Israel, which is still hammering Iran with a barrage of military strikes.
The Jerusalem Post reported on the Musk decision shortly after his post on X as part of a story on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vocal challenge in a televised speech for the Iranian people to revolt against Iran’s political leadership.
Musk’s use of Starlink in concert with Israel’s (and, perhaps, the United States’) drive for regime change in Iran has been underway for some time.
Starlink already exists, in some form, in Iran. Roughly 20,000 Starlink terminals, purchased on the black market, are believed to be active in Iran. Musk’s decision allows those terminals to bring the outside world to Iran despite the internet blackout imposed by Iran’s political leaders.
But the connection between Musk and the companies he controls runs even deeper. Another one of Musk’s companies—SpaceX, which has billions in contracts with parts of the Trump administration—has gotten into the business of producing Starlink terminals like the ones that have made their way into Iran.
SpaceX has now produced 10 million Starlink terminals, according to a public LinkedIn post by a senior facilities manager at SpaceX.
“It took almost 4 years to build our first 5 million kits, and we doubled that in about 11 months,” SpaceX senior facilities manager Sujay Soman wrote in a LinkedIn post.
Starlink is well on its way toward becoming an information-delivery platform that can operate even in countries that, like Iran, have shut down traditional internet functions. Earlier this month, SpaceX announced that Starlink had surpassed 6 million subscribers across 140 markets.
In March, SpaceX reported that its Texas facility had the capacity to churn out 15,000 Starlink dishes per day, or nearly 5.5 million per year. At that rate, it will quickly double its current output—which is a huge contrast from 2021, when SpaceX was producing only 5,000 dishes per week.
Meanwhile, while Musk, a private citizen, is using his own company to facilitate information delivery into Iran, the Trump administration has gone out of its way to destroy Voice of America, which has historically tried to fulfill much the same mission around the globe.
The Trump administration on Friday sent out termination notices to hundreds of employees at Voice of America—including to employees working for VOA’s Persian-language service who were called back from administrative leave just last week in the wake of Israel’s attack on Iran, Politico reported.
Which raises the question: Are tech overlords like Elon Musk driving sensitive technology decisions in Trump’s White House that, like the decision to turn on black market Starlink terminals in Iran, have the potential to inadvertently pull America into the Israel-Iran conflict?
Jeff Nesbit was the director of legislative and public affairs at the National Science Foundation during the Obama and Bush administrations.