Starlink's reach ties 13 million users to Musk's decisions on who gets access

More than 60% of $18.6bn is more than $11.2bn ^[15]. That leaves less than $7.4bn of SpaceX's revenue for the rest of the company ^[16], and Business Insider reports that only Starlink turned a profit ^[3]. For buyers, the split has a reassuring side. SpaceX makes its profit from Starlink subscribers, so the company has a commercial interest in keeping them connected.

Luke Hartley, a sailing influencer whose dish went overboard in the Pacific in October 2023 ^[14], put the user's case plainly. "We can criticize Musk till the cows come home, but it's an incredible product," he said ^[11]. Nothing in the Ukraine record disputes that. It raises a separate question: who decides whether a given user gets service, and on what grounds.

In Ukraine, Musk has made those decisions. In 2023 he said he had refused a request to activate Starlink for a Ukrainian assault on Crimea because he was concerned that "SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war" ^[6]. The year before, he threatened to stop supplying Ukraine with terminals over a funding dispute ^[7]. According to Business Insider, Reuters reported last July that he jeopardised a 2022 counteroffensive by cutting Starlink access to frontline troops, and Musk did not respond to that report ^[8]. In a March 2025 post on X he pledged never to switch off Ukraine's terminals, and never to threaten a shutoff as leverage in a negotiation ^[9].

The same discretion has also worked in Ukraine's favour. In February, SpaceX shut down Russian forces' illicit use of Starlink terminals after Ukraine's then-defence minister appealed to Musk personally. The cutoff helped Ukraine retake territory ^[10]. A sergeant who flies drones in Ukraine's unmanned brigades described what this looks like from the user's side. "If you are military and you're operating a drone, you cannot rely on something unpredictable. All the systems should be under control," he said ^[12]. "But we have no alternative right now." ^[13]

For a commercial operator, I think the lesson is about governance. Access in Ukraine turned on the owner's judgement both for and against the user, and in February it turned on a minister being able to reach him directly ^[10]. Business Insider reports that Starlink is so useful in far-flung and war-torn places, with so few alternatives, that it has given Musk a rare immunity to political pressure ^[17]. Its account does not name or size competing networks, so this record cannot tell a given buyer how far it can spread the risk.

The question for this quarter is different from the question for this decade. Today the dependency is concentrated among users in remote and war-torn places ^[17]. SpaceX plans to launch tens of thousands more satellites in the coming years to make Starlink the world's premier wireless carrier and broadband provider ^[4]. A buyer that makes Starlink its main remote link this quarter gets a product its users praise and, in a war zone at least, one with no current substitute ^[11][13]. If the expansion works, the same dependency extends into ordinary broadband, under an owner who has already decided in Ukraine who gets service and who does not ^[6][10].