Elon Musk had a great trading day this Thursday. Tesla shares soared on the stock market and with this his fortune increased by more than 33,000 million in a single day, according to the Bloomberg billionaires index. The richest man in the world, whose fortune already amounts to $270 billion, has allocated $75 million to Republican Donald Trump’s campaign for the United States presidential election. Apart from political harmony, it has now become known something else that Musk has in common with Trump. As revealed this Thursday The Wall Street Journal, The billionaire has maintained regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin since at least 2022. Trump himself He has remained in contact with Putin after his departure from the White House in January 2021 and has spoken with him on the phone at least seven times, according to the book War, recently published.
Several current and former officials from the United States, Europe and Russia have told the New York newspaper that Musk has discussed personal, business and geopolitical issues with Putin. The Russian president at one point asked Musk to avoid activating his Starlink satellite network and providing internet service over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping, two sources told the media. The network has not yet received authorization to operate in Taiwan.
SpaceX, which operates the Starlink service, won a classified $1.8 billion contract in 2021 and is the primary rocket launcher for the Pentagon and NASA. Musk has a security clearance that allows him access to certain classified information. At a rally last Thursday in Folsom (Pennsylvania), Musk spoke about this access. “I have a top secret clearance, but, I would have to say, like most things I’m aware of, the reason they keep it top secret is because it’s so boring.”
Starlink has been key to Ukraine’s connectivity. Last year it emerged that the billionaire In 2022, it rejected a request for its Starlink communications satellites to facilitate an attack by Ukraine. against the Russian Black Sea military fleet. The tycoon confirmed it on his social network: “We received an urgent request from government authorities to activate Starlink to Sebastopol. The obvious intention was to sink most of the docked Russian fleet,” the businessman wrote. “If I had accepted their request, SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and an escalation of the conflict,” he added.
The New York newspaper now includes new revelations. According to him, in May 2022, Russia’s space chief said in a post on Telegram that Musk would ‘respond like an adult’ for supplying Starlink to Ukraine’s Azov battalion, which the Kremlin had singled out for the far-right ideology of some of its members. members. Later that year, Musk held regular conversations with “senior Russians.” At the time, there was pressure from the Kremlin on Musk’s businesses and “implicit threats against him,” a source told TWSJ.
Musk then began to disclose positions more aligned with that of Russia. He began to complain that SpaceX was losing money financing terminals in Ukraine, became increasingly critical of aid to kyiv and defended peace proposals that fulfilled some of Russian aspirations, including that Ukraine recognize Russian sovereignty over Crimea.
The financial newspaper’s intelligence sources claim that Musk and Putin have remained in contact since then and during this year, when Musk began to intensify his criticism of US military aid to Ukraine and became involved in Trump’s election campaign.
Earlier this year, Musk posted on his social network Controversial host Tucker Carlson’s two-hour interview with the Russian leader inside the Kremlin and publicized it by tweeting live during its broadcast. In that interview, Putin said he was sure Musk “was an intelligent person.” “There is no one to stop Elon Musk, he is going to do what he thinks he has to do. You have to find some point in common with him, you have to find some way to persuade him,” he said.
