Putin's Favorite Billionaire Holds the Keys to America's Defense

On Tuesday, Vladimir Putin stopped at an exhibition in Moscow to praise an American (South African, really).

“Elon Musk is a genius, a real genius,” he said.

He added that Moscow stays in contact with Musk on space matters, despite “all political issues.”

This tracks because just two weeks earlier, Ukrainian troops found their satellite links throttled in the middle of a war.

Then Musk went online and accused Ukraine of breaking Starlink’s terms of service with offensive drone strikes.

That “loophole,” he said, “was closed last week.”

Kyiv flatly denied it.

But by then, the damage was done.

Ukraine’s Drone Defenses Were Throttled for Ten Days

Starting October 14, Starshield terminals in Ukraine stopped holding a connection above roughly 160 kilometers per hour.

Starshield is the military-grade version of Starlink, paid for through U.S. government contracts.

That cap crippled the Ukrainian interceptors built to chase down Russia’s jet-powered attack drones.

Missions were scrubbed.

Ukraine had also just received 2,000 new Bars drone interceptors, paid for by a European ally. Zelensky says the restrictions knocked them out of action.

On October 19, five days into the slowdown, a Russian drone slammed into a park in Kharkiv.

It killed five people, including a 1-year-old girl.

That same day, according to photos obtained by CBS News, the Starlink connections feeding Ukraine’s ground-based air defense radars had slowed to 0.1 megabytes per second.

Too slow to load a webpage.

Full service didn’t come back until October 24.

Of course, by that time, at least 57 civilians had been killed and over 300 more were injured in the period Starlink was down.

And that’s to say nothing of the frontline casualties.

Those deaths haven’t yet been tallied (or released).

In any case, for ten days, Ukraine fought off Russian drones with its air defenses hobbled, and Ukrainian families paid for it.

So who flipped the switch?

Musk says SpaceX closed a loophole. He also says the U.S. government controls changes to Starshield.

President Trump won’t say who made the decision.

Reuters cited officials who said the order came from inside the White House, which a senior official denied.

“Nobody knows the rules right now,” one analyst told Time.

That is the problem in a nutshell.

Moscow’s Main Man

In 2022, Musk refused Ukraine’s request to extend Starlink coverage to Russian-occupied Crimea ahead of a strike. Ukrainian naval drones lost their connection and washed ashore.

That same year, he floated his own “peace plan” that would have handed Crimea to Russia for good.

In 2025, Reuters reported that U.S. negotiators warned Kyiv that Starlink could be shut off during the fight over Ukraine’s critical minerals. Musk denied it.

And now Putin is calling him a genius.

Draw your own conclusions.

Mine is simple: no country should let its battlefield communications hinge on the mood of one erratic, megalomaniacal billionaire.

That includes ours.

America Has Its Own Starlink Problem

SpaceX won five of the seven national security launch missions the Space Force handed out for fiscal 2026.

It holds more than $8 billion in Golden Dome contracts, roughly a third of everything the program has committed so far.

It carries spy satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office and runs Starshield for the Pentagon.

And Musk’s reach goes well beyond the contracts.

In March 2025, he walked into the Pentagon for a meeting with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, after The New York Times reported he’d be briefed on war plans for China. Trump called that report “ridiculous,” and Hegseth called it an informal chat about innovation.

Meanwhile, his DOGE team was combing through federal agencies and their data.

Now the DOGE alumni are cashing in.

A group of them, including two who previously worked at SpaceX, launched an AI military cyber startup called Cathedral this summer.

One co-founder served as the Pentagon’s chief data officer until recently.

Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia have already valued it at $1.4 billion.

It has no confirmed Pentagon contracts. Yet.

Nevertheless, the people who spent last year inside the government’s systems are now lining up to sell to it.

It’s galling.

And it’s a national security risk the American people shouldn’t have to accept.

Washington Needs a Second Supplier, and a Third

The fix is the same one any good procurement officer would give you.

Don’t let a single vendor own a critical capability.

Every rocket, satellite, and ground station the Pentagon buys from someone other than SpaceX makes America harder to hold hostage.

And that shift is already underway.

I’ve found three companies positioned to take that business.

The first builds rockets, builds satellites, and is one of the few American makers of space-grade solar cells. Its backlog just topped $2.3 billion, and its new reusable rocket was built to go head-to-head with SpaceX’s Falcon 9.

The second just won a Pentagon contract to build the dispensers that deploy small satellites once a rocket reaches orbit. It’s also building pieces of Golden Dome.

The third runs the ground. It won a $446.8 million Space Force contract to build the network that controls America’s missile-tracking satellites.

Each one makes the Pentagon less dependent on Elon Musk.

And each one trades at a sliver of SpaceX’s valuation.

I’ve put the names, tickers, and buy-up-to prices for all three in my new briefing.

America can’t afford to let one man hold the switch.

These three companies are how we take it back.