Topline
Trillionaire SpaceX chief Elon Musk on Wednesday accused unnamed Indian business figures of keeping Starlink, his company’s satellite internet service, out of the country to preserve a monopoly he says has a chokehold on the Indian people.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk at the White House on Sept. 29, 2026.
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Key Facts
SpaceX executive Lauren Dreyer on Wednesday said Starlink has built 20 gateway sites (the hardware that connects space satellites to the wired ground network) with hundreds of antennas across India and is ready to launch an internet service that will comply with Indian data security laws.
The launch has been stalled, however, pending government regulatory clearances and spectrum allocation, and Musk is blaming unnamed “certain oligarchs” he says are blocking Starlink to protect their monopoly on Indian users.
Musk didn’t cite specific evidence or name names in his X post, but said followers “can guess who they are” and called the alleged blockade a “crime against the people of India.”
Starlink faces direct competition in India’s emerging satellite internet market from Eutelsat OneWeb (backed by billionaire Sunil Mittal’s Bharti Group) and Reliance Jio Space Technology, owned by India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani.
CRUCIAL QUOTE
“We’re standing ready to serve India. Once India is ready,” Dreyer said. “We’re ready to work for the government, ready to work with operators, ready to work with industries.”
WHAT WE DON’T KNOW
How much Starlink internet will cost Indian users. In the U.S. and western Europe, standard users must buy a dish kit that costs between $300 and $600 upfront and then pay about $90 to $120 per month for service. In lower-income markets, like parts of Latin America and Africa, SpaceX uses regional pricing to bring monthly fees down closer to $30 to $50 per month, but hardware costs remain a hurdle.
Key background
India has crossed the 1 billion mark in its number of internet subscriptions, making it the second-largest online market in the world, behind China. While overall numbers are massive, internet penetration drops sharply in non-urban areas and an estimated 500 million Indians don’t have internet service. That lack of access is due to numerous complications, including unreliable power grids and affordability, but topography and infrastructure costs are the largest barriers—both things Starlink and other low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite internet providers could work around. LEO internet providers are able to bypass the immense cost of laying physical fiber cables across rivers, oceans and mountains by transmitting high-speed broadband directly from low-altitude satellites to small ground antennas at a fraction of traditional infrastructure costs. The satellite-to-ground model eliminates the need to build and power thousands of remote terrestrial cell towers, allowing instant coverage across vast geographical areas regardless of local terrain.
BIG NUMBER
More than 11,100. That’s how many Starlink satellites SpaceX has in orbit.
TANGENT
Musk’s commentary Wednesday was linked to a post from an X account called “DogeDesigner,” an anonymous account known for its close affiliation with dogecoin projects and frequent engagement with Musk’s posts. The post Musk amplified made several claims that have not been independently confirmed, including that 11,256 of India’s listed villages still lacked 4G internet coverage as of May 2026.
FORBES VALUATION
Musk is worth an estimated $1 trillion Wednesday as the world’s first and thus far only trillionaire, largely due to his stakes in SpaceX and Tesla. Ambani, the 25th-richest person in the world, runs the $125 billion company Reliance Industries, which has interests in petrochemicals, oil and gas, telecom, retail, media and financial services. Reliance’s telecom and broadband service, Jio, is actively building out its own satellite strategy to directly counter Starlink. Mittal, worth an estimated $12.8 billion Wednesday, owns one of India’s largest mobile phone operators and his internet company Bharti Enterprises co-owns Eutelsat OneWeb, which operates a network of 600-650 internet-providing satellites.
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