New Delhi: Elon Musk has sent his public feud with Starlink’s late launch in India into overdrive.Elon Musk has brought his public feud with Starlink’s late launch in India to a head. He outright and sarcastically attacked the CEO of Reliance Industries, Mukesh Ambani, in an open letter on X, and then sent out the media reports on the Reliance-associated political spending.
In the post, basically addressed to Prime Minister Ambani, Musk apologised for his initial mistake in not knowing that Ambani was the “real boss of India.” He demanded that Ambani give Starlink a chance to compete when its time will come because he doesn’t want to have a monopoly. He believed satellite Internet could provide service to areas with no Internet service, providing education to kids and small businesses access to around the world buyers. At the time of the screenshot there were approximately 87 million views of the post.
Matters started this week. Without providing any proof, Musk first accused “oligarchs” of trying to prevent Starlink from launching to safeguard a chokehold on the monopolist market. He questioned on Thursday whether Ambani was the actual emperor of India. H hours earlier the Department of Telecommunications, which is part of the ministry of electronics and IT, had turned him down, stating that all satellite operators were awaiting security clearance. Musk said that Starlink has been operating for five years to meet the Indian needs. Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi got his boots dusty as well, and wrote, “Welcome to India Elon, wait till you meet the other player.”
There is already some business connection which complicates the situation. In March 2025, both Jio and Bharti Airtel inked distribution deals with SpaceX once its authorisations are received. Both of these companies are also developing their own satellite services. An in-house satellite broadband stack is on the advance, says Jio’s Akash Ambani Business Today. He didn’t comment on Musk’s remarks, stating that he didn’t see them.
Musk later shared screenshots of two reports that were released hours ago. In 2022, one was an Al Jazeera investigation conducted by The Reporters’ Collective and ad.watch. It reported that NEWJ, a media start-up that is a subsidiary of Jio Platforms, ran 718 political advertisements on Facebook and Instagram between February 2019 and November 2020. The investigation reported that the ads had more than 290 million views and cost nearly 5.2 million rupees. Many of them were dressed up as newsmen and loved the BJP, the reporters said. Indian election laws also didn’t address such “surrogate” advertising on social media, they added. NEWJ’s CEO stated that the company abiders by the advertisements policies of Meta. Meta said it treats all political parties the same. Reliance and Jio declined to answer the reporters’ questions.
The second screen shared by Indian Express had a headline reading that Reliance connected Qwik Supply donated Rs 385 crore to BJP and Rs 25 crore to Shiv Sena in the form of electoral bonds in March 2024. The screenshots are from both reports (which are several years old) and fail to show any response from Reliance. They also fail to demonstrate that the allegations of political funding have a connection to Starlink’s licensing.
Starlink claims to be earmarked for the Indian launch. The government and Reliance have yet to mention any timeline for the decision on its licence.
