Musk to Ambani: “Are You the Real Boss of India?”
Elon Musk has sharply escalated his public campaign for Starlink’s full commercial launch in India, directly targeting Mukesh Ambani in a sarcastic open letter posted on X.
Addressing him as “Dear Prime Minister Ambani,” Musk wrote: “Please accept my humble apologies for not realizing that you are the real boss of India. Naturally, you would prefer to maintain your monopolistic exploitation of the great people of India, but would you nonetheless consider allowing Starlink to compete?”
He highlighted the stakes for ordinary Indians. Large parts of the country still lack reliable internet, he noted, denying children educational opportunities and preventing small businesses from reaching global markets. Starlink, Musk argued, would change those lives for the better. In a follow-up post, he added that the service has repeatedly proven essential for saving lives during natural disasters when terrestrial networks fail.
The posts come after years of regulatory delays. Starlink has secured a GMPCS licence and authorisation for its satellite constellation, but commercial operations remain pending security clearances and spectrum allocation. The same process applies to two other players: Reliance Jio’s satellite arm and Bharti-backed Eutelsat OneWeb. India’s government has rejected Musk’s broader claims of “oligarchs” blocking the service to protect monopolies, stating that the framework is fair and non-discriminatory and that all three licensees are at broadly the same stage.
Reliance Jio dominates India’s mobile broadband market. Critics of the delays point to the competitive threat Starlink could pose in underserved rural and remote areas where traditional towers are uneconomical. Supporters of the government’s caution cite security, data localisation and orderly spectrum management as legitimate concerns.
Musk’s latest broadside frames the issue in stark terms: connectivity for the least-served versus the interests of entrenched players. Whether the pointed rhetoric accelerates approvals or hardens positions remains to be seen. What is clear is that satellite internet has become the latest front in a high-stakes contest over who controls access to the digital future for more than a billion people.
