Millions of people and dozens of countries rely on Starlink, giving Elon Musk unprecedented leverage

Luke Hartley realized how important Elon Musk's Starlink was to him when it fell overboard.

It was a major blow for the music teacher turned sailing influencer, who tells me he made far more money posting about his three-year voyage around the world on TikTok via Starlink than he ever had in the US education system. Without satellite internet, he had no way to upload the videos that were funding his voyage, check weather forecasts, or call his family.

From the remote Pacific to the front lines of Ukraine, Starlink's network of orbital internet satellites has become indispensable to 13 million people in more than 167 countries. Starlink accounted for more than 60% of the $18.6 billion in revenue SpaceX generated last year, and was the only part of the business to turn a profit.

Many users who like it love it, and have flooded social media with praise for Musk and his creation.

The world's richest man's attempt to gut government bureaucracy with DOGE, his massive political donations, and his erratic and incendiary posting habits on X have cost him Tesla customers and inspired boycotts and protests against his other companies. But Starlink is so useful in far-flung and war-torn places — and has so few alternatives — that it has granted Musk a rare level of immunity to political gravity. It's also left governments, adventurers, and digital nomads struggling to reconcile their reliance on the technology with the controversies that swirl around Musk.

Nowhere is this dance between reluctance and reliance more delicately choreographed than in Ukraine, where Starlink has been essential in the war against Russia. Starlink satellites have been widely adopted across the Ukrainian military as a comms system that cannot be hacked or jammed by Russian radio warfare. The service has allowed ground teams to adapt their targets mid-mission and remotely control drones with flawless video almost to the moment of impact, with no need for giant antennas that could reveal their position.

In 2023, Musk sparked global headlines when he revealed he refused a request to activate Starlink to assist a Ukrainian assault on Crimea because he was concerned that "SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war."

Musk did not respond to the report, but he previously said in a March 2025 X post that he would never turn off Ukrainian terminals or use the threat of doing so as a bargaining chip, no matter how much he disagreed with the country's government.

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Some servicemembers and researchers say Ukraine's dependent yet unstable relationship with Starlink leaves them uneasy. "If you are military and you're operating a drone, you cannot rely on something unpredictable. All the systems should be under control," says one drone pilot and sergeant in Ukraine's unmanned brigades. "But we have no alternative right now," he adds.