Elon Musk
has been in regular contact with Putin for two years, says report
Alleged
talks between billionaire and Russian president could have enormous security
implications
Julian
Borger
Fri 25 Oct
2024 15.47 BST
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.”
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