Tech billionaire Elon Musk and Russian President Vladimir Putin have been regularly contacting each over the last two years, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday night.
The topics of discussion have included personal matters, business, and geopolitical issues, according to current and former United States, European, and Russian officials.
Among many of the deeply concerning revelations in WSJ‘s report include a request from Putin made last year asking Musk to not activate his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favor to China’s top leader, Xi Jinping. Russia heavily relies on China for trade, including industrial equipment and consumer goods, and to weather Western sanctions.
Musk faced further tensions from the Kremlin in 2022, following his strong public support for Kyiv after the Russian invasion in February that year. Musk donated several hundred Starlink terminals to Ukraine, providing free internet access by July to large areas of the country devastated by the Russian attacks.
However, by May 2022, Russia’s space chief said in a Telegram post that the tech billionaire would “answer like an adult” for providing Starlink to Ukraine’s Azov battalion. Later that year, a person familiar with the conversations said that Musk was communicating regularly with “high-level Russians” and that the Kremlin had put pressure on his businesses and made “implicit threats against him.”
Around this time, Musk became more critical of American aid to Ukraine and blamed the terminals in Ukraine for why SpaceX was losing money. By October 2022, Musk reached out to his followers on X to support a peace agenda that “mirrored some aspects of the Kremlin’s offer to Ukraine at the time.”
In February of this year, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson invited Putin for a two-hour long interview on X (formerly Twitter), where Tucker has a paid partnership with the Musk-owned social media platform. During the conversation, Putin spent 30 minutes lecturing on Russian and Ukrainian history, while claiming Ukraine had no independent national identity to justify its sovereignty — a claim historians and Russian propaganda experts have categorically rejected.
“There’s no stopping Elon Musk, he’s going to do what he thinks he needs to do,” Putin told Carlson. “You need to find some common ground with him, you need to search for some ways to persuade him.”
One current and one former intelligence source told WSJ that Musk and Putin have continued to stay in contact. The report is concerning given that Musk, the world’s richest man, has become one of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s key supporters and sources of cash in the 2024 election.
Musk has recently come under the scrutiny of the U.S Justice Department after offering payouts — and a chance at $1 million — to registered voters who get other registered, swing state residents to sign a “Petition in Favor of Free Speech and the Right to Bear Arms.” The Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section, which overlooks federal election laws, sent a letter to Musk warning that his million-dollar sweepstakes for registered voters may be illegal.
