Elon Musk, the world’s richest man who is now central to Donald Trump’s election campaign, has been in regular contact with Vladimir Putin for the past two years, according to a report in the US.
The Wall Street Journal, citing several in-post and former US, European and Russian officials, reported that the conversations between the two men ranged from the personal to the geopolitical and included a request from the Russian leader not to activate his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favour to the Chinese leader and Putin ally, Xi Jinping.
The implications of a secret channel of communication between Musk and Putin are enormous for western security. The Tesla tycoon is a key player in the US space programme and has a high-level security clearance. His company SpaceX launches US national security satellites, his Starlink satellite communications system is critical to the war in Ukraine, and he runs one of the world’s biggest and most influential social media platforms, X, which has provided a vehicle for Russian disinformation campaigns.
Furthermore, if Trump is elected on 5 November, Musk could play an important part in a new US administration. He has poured his own money into the campaign and made multiple personal appearances at rallies. Trump has suggested Musk could head a government commission on efficiency if he wins.
“This is a story about oligarch capture of the US,” said Fiona Hill, who was the senior director for European and Russian affairs in the Trump White House. She compared the situation in the US now to the heyday of oligarchs in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.
“If people like Musk get Trump re-elected, they’ll expect all kinds of regulatory gifts in their favour,” said Hill, who is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the chancellor of Durham University and a defence adviser to the UK government.
She added: “He is in a position to command government contracts, potentially with a government position, and there are loads of militaries around the world dependent on his systems, not least Ukraine.”
Earlier this month, the journalist Bob Woodard reported in his new book that Trump himself has had as many as seven private phone calls with Putin since leaving office. Trump has said he will not comment on the reporting but that if he had spoken with Putin it would have been “a smart thing”.
The Wall Street Journal report said the extent of Musk’s contacts with Putin was a closely held secret and even some officials in the Biden White House had been unaware of them.
Musk had not commented on the report by Friday afternoon. The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, claimed the only communication the Kremlin had had with Musk was over a single telephone call in which he and Putin discussed “space as well as current and future technologies”.
Peskov insisted that neither Putin nor other Kremlin officials were holding regular conversations with Musk.
However, the Journal report said that the conversations with top Russian officials ran from 2022 into this year and included Sergei Kiriyenko, Putin’s first deputy chief of staff. Kiriyenko was accused by the US justice department last month of creating 30 internet domains, some on X, to spread Russian disinformation intended to erode support for Ukraine and influence the US presidential election.
In October 2022, Musk tweeted a “Ukraine-Russia peace” plan that largely reflected Moscow’s positions.
Ian Bremmer, a political scientist who runs the US consulting firm Eurasia Group, said Musk had told him he had spoken directly with Putin and Kremlin officials about Ukraine. Musk denied Bremmer’s claim, but Hill, who attended the same elite conference in Aspen, Colorado as Musk a month before, said it was true.
She said: “He did tell Ian Bremmer that he was talking to Putin and he told many other people that he was. He was just basically channelling the kind of things that Putin had told him.”
