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After SpaceX’s blockbuster IPO last week, it’s facing an agonizing crunch to show investors that it has a viable path to profitability.
Fortunately for its CEO Elon Musk, he’s spent years currying favor with any politicians who might stand in his way. He threw his whole weight behind Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2024, giving him extraordinary sway over the White House and the federal government.
One egregious example is his close relationship with Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr, whose unabashed attempts to gain Musk’s favor ultimately got him the job. That’s important because SpaceX’s orbital Starlink broadband service is currently the rocket company’s most significant source of revenue. And thanks to Musk’s cozy bonds with Carr and the Trump administration, little stands in the way of SpaceX filling our planet’s orbit with even more environmentally-damaging satellites and occupying ever larger swathes of the frequency spectrum.
As TechDirt‘s Karl Bode points out, Carr’s FCC has bent over backwards to clear the way for Musk, from abandoning regulatory oversight to going after companies that control parts of the spectrum that SpaceX wants for itself.
According to Bode, the Trump administration went as far as to hijack a 2021 infrastructure bill to redirect billions more to Musk — at the cost of efforts originally intended to make fiber internet access more affordable to rural Americans.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon has awarded SpaceX numerous multibillion-dollar contracts to develop space-borne defense tech and a military communication network, once again highlighting how the newly-minted trillionaire’s business successes have heavily relied on US government subsidies.
Musk’s SpaceX has also deeply ingrained itself with Trump’s NASA, which has appointed a Musk nominee and close business partner as its administrator, and made the company a key part of its efforts to settle on the Moon.
In short, the conflicts of interest between Musk and the Trump administration have reached staggering levels. And to society, the implications of such blatant cronyism could be sweeping, from atrophying regulation and loss of accountability to further concentration of power and money among the wealthiest people on Earth.
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