“What can be very frustrating is that regulation is often irrational,” Musk told an audience at Stanford in 2003. “It doesn’t make any sense.” He arrived at the following solution: He would be the one to decide what made sense. And he would not be shy about exercising this authority, even if it meant challenging the law. “If the rules are such that you can’t make progress, then you have to fight the rules,” he said. SpaceX would fight the rules constantly, whether those set by NASA, the Pentagon, or the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA).

These moves weren’t just about getting the government out of the way but, more precisely, taking on its powers for himself. The same logic of privatization that enabled Blackwater to operate freely in Iraq was vesting him with powers previously unimaginable for private entities. SpaceX would enjoy the advantages of being a government contractor with little in the way of government supervision. Significantly, Musk secured this position with the support of key actors within the state: He applied pressure from the outside while sympathetic officials did what they could to accelerate outsourcing and deregulation from the inside.

These officials often framed their efforts as an attempt to increase competition in government contracting, so that markets long controlled by the defense primes could be opened up to smaller, less conventional firms. The irony is that the endpoint of this process — which began under the Bush administration but continued through the Obama administration and beyond —​­ would be the formation of a new monopoly. SpaceX would come to dominate the launch market so completely that it became far more powerful than a firm like Lockheed ever was.

Admittedly, the company conquered the market in large part by achieving a dramatic reduction in launch costs. In this sense, reformers like Worden and Griffin were entirely correct that changing the structure of government contracting would incentivize the innovation needed to make getting to space cheaper. But this cheapness came with a cost: The state would eventually cede its sovereignty to such a degree that it was forced to buy it back in increments from a corporation.

In September 2008, the Falcon 1 finally reached orbit for the first time, becoming the first privately developed liquid-fuel rocket to do so. “There are only a handful of countries on Earth that have done this,” Musk announced afterwards. “It’s normally a country thing, not a company thing.” But Muskism is not about replacing countries with ​­companies — ​­it is about fusing the two. By the 2020s, Musk’s dominance of the launch market meant that states needed his infrastructure to achieve their goals.

Storming heaven

With SpaceX, Muskism’s pursuit of state symbiosis converged with the privatizing impulses of the early 21st century to find a deeper channel. The company became a global platform for national projects, a purveyor of sovereignty as a service not only to government agencies within the United States but to those throughout the world. SpaceX had always sought business with other countries: as early as 2003, the company secured a $6 million deal to launch a communications satellite for the Malaysian government. But its full potential as a global platform for national projects would be fulfilled by Starlink, the satellite internet service that Musk first announced in 2015.

Satellite internet had existed for decades but was plagued by slow speeds. Starlink’s innovation was to bring the satellites closer to ​­Earth — ​­much closer. Traditional geostationary satellites orbit 20,000 miles up. To increase network bandwidth, Musk decided to place his satellites in low Earth orbit, around 400 miles up. But there was a catch: You needed a lot more satellites.

In May 2019, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets began launching Starlink satellites into orbit. By 2025, there were more than 8,000 of them, which accounted for two-thirds of all active satellites. Today, if you look up at the night sky and you see a small light moving, it more than likely belongs to Musk. In less than a decade, he has transformed the heavens. Without most of us realizing it, the lower atmosphere has become a beehive of solar-winged drones speaking to one another by lasers. If Apollo ​symbolized the first Space Age, the second Space Age belongs to the low-​­flying, high-speed satellites that make up Starlink’s “Megaconstellations.”

Starlink began its commercial service in 2021, initially focusing on areas of the United States where traditional broadband infrastructure was limited or nonexistent. But it soon began negotiating with governments around the world to secure regulatory approval and, by 2025, was available in more than 100 countries. Starlink also became a government contractor, as agencies in the United States and other countries purchased satellite internet subscriptions. Another source of public money sought by Starlink has been subsidies for connecting under- served communities: in 2020, Trump’s FCC tentatively awarded the company nearly $900 million to help get rural households and businesses online. While Biden’s FCC revoked the award, the second Trump administration has rewritten the rules for a different federal grant program to open the spigot for Starlink.

If sovereignty could be purchased on a subscription basis, the terms of service would ensure that power remained in private hands.

Most important, however, is how indispensable Starlink has become to modern militaries. The turning point came after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when the portable Starlink receivers became an essential means of battlefield communication and coordination by Ukrainian forces. This served as a proof of concept for further investment by the U.S. government, which had already closed a $1.8 billion contract with SpaceX in 2021 to build a military version of Starlink called Starshield that provides additional capabilities such as encrypted communications, radio and optical sensing for reconnaissance, infrared sensors for early missile detection, and the ability to locate and track objects on Earth. Starshield is the fulfillment of the old Star Wars dream: a swarm of cheap, nimble satellites that can ensure American space supremacy. If some are taken out, the mesh still works. This is the architecture of a distributed network — ​­what defense officials, in an update of the network-centric warfare concept of the 1990s, have begun to call “mosaic warfare.”

If the invasion of Ukraine made Starlink a household name, however, it also clarified the risks posed by SpaceX’s growing power. According to his biographer Walter Isaacson, Musk disabled Starlink access within a hundred kilometers of the coast of Crimea in September 2022 in order to prevent an attack by Ukrainian drone submarines on the Russian Navy. Because the drones required internet connectivity, they didn’t work without Starlink. Isaacson reports that Musk was guided by a conversation he had held a few weeks earlier with the Russian ambassador to the United States, who warned him that an incursion into Crimea could lead to nuclear war. The journalist Ronan Farrow, who helped publicize the incident, observed that “there is little precedent for a civilian’s becoming the arbiter of a war between nations in such a granular way.”

Musk later denied the story, tweeting that Starlink had already been disabled in the region so “SpaceX did not de­activate anything.” Isaacson followed up with a correction that wholeheartedly accepted Musk’s version of events. But, in a separate incident reported by Reuters, it was revealed that Musk did cut service in eastern Ukraine around the same time, crippling a planned Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kherson. (Musk didn’t comment on the article, while a SpaceX spokesperson dismissed the reporting as “inaccurate.”) After the Polish foreign minister warned his country would be “forced to look for other suppliers” if Starlink was an “unreliable provider,” Musk shot back, “Be quiet, small man.” When a single individual owns the infrastructure, he doesn’t need to run a government to shape geopolitics.

To say that Muskism offers sovereignty as a service is not to imply it is pure exploitation. If sovereignty means not only freedom from interference but also the capacity to act, then Musk’s products do empower nations. Dozens of countries have used SpaceX to put their own satellites into orbit. Spain called its SpaceX satellite launch a step toward “strategic sovereignty.” But this exercise of state power depends on the whims of a single man.

The wager of Muskism is that sovereignty, going forward, will be infrastructural before it is territorial — defined by access to ​bandwidth, compute, launch cadence, and orbital real estate as much as by borders and bureaucracies. During his dot-com days, ​Musk had treated money as code. At SpaceX, he treated laws and regulations the same way, as both readable and writable. If sovereignty could be purchased on a subscription basis, the terms of service would ensure that power remained in private hands.