Elon Musk circulated posts on X amplifying media reports — one alleging that a firm with Reliance funding assisted in promoting BJP campaigns across social media platforms, another pointing to a Reliance-linked company's political donations to the party in power. The two reports shared by Musk included a 2022 Al Jazeera piece examining how a Reliance-funded organisation was said to support BJP election activity on Facebook, alongside an archived 2024 piece from a news outlet concerning Qwik Supply.
Figures from that report placed the Reliance-affiliated entity's electoral bond contributions at Rs 385 crore channelled to the BJP and a further Rs 25 crore directed toward the Shiv Sena.
The posts form part of Musk's ongoing public commentary directed at Mukesh Ambani, set against a dispute over the timeline of Starlink's satellite broadband rollout in India. Musk has contended that established commercial players have taken steps to block his service from gaining a foothold in the Indian market in order to preserve their own positions. No statement from Reliance addressing Musk's claims had been made available to the public.
Officials have held that the regulatory structure governing telecom and satellite authorisations treats all parties on equal terms, characterising objections that frame the process as selectively applied as unfounded and without legal merit.
Before those reports went up, Musk had addressed Ambani using the title "Prime Minister" and put forward the argument that Ambani was protecting a monopoly from outside competition. He also raised doubts about whether the industrialist would permit Starlink to operate in the Indian market, addressing the prime minister in a written statement that sarcastically framed the tycoon as the country's true seat of power and offered an ironic expression of regret for having overlooked that arrangement.
In a post published on X that Friday, Musk put a question to the telecom operator — whether, despite an apparent preference for holding an uncontested market position over Indian consumers, it would nonetheless consider opening the door to Starlink as a competitor. Poor internet infrastructure across vast portions of India, he argued, denies schoolchildren the ability to participate in digital education while shutting out smaller businesses from trade beyond national borders. He suggested that Starlink had the potential to bring improvements to their lives.
A follow-up post from Musk put forward the assertion that Starlink had served as a lifeline during natural disasters around the world at times when other communication networks went down. He went further, arguing that allowing the platform to operate across India carried the prospect of bringing down the number of deaths in the country.
Musk had previously taken to X to question the status of Starlink's authorisation in India, pointing to the service's operational licences across more than 165 countries and what he described as five years of work to satisfy the government's regulatory framework. Communications Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia, in remarks delivered on Friday, disputed the notion that India allows monopolistic conditions to exist in any sector of its economy. Three satellite communication licences had already been granted to separate companies, each of which stood free to launch operations once the requisite security conditions and other set milestones were met, he noted.
At the India Mobile Congress in Delhi, Scindia outlined the Department of Telecommunications' technology-neutral stance, describing its role as ensuring every customer has access to a full range of services from which they can make their own choices. His position was that marketplace conditions place the decision in consumers' hands — both the choice of service type and, within any given service bundle, the choice of provider.
Licences for satellite services have been granted to three operators — Starlink, the venture founded by Elon Musk; Jio Satcom, operating under the Reliance Jio umbrella; and Eutelsat OneWeb, which carries backing from Bharti. Project Kuiper from Amazon has conveyed its interest in participating, and the minister noted that the same established procedure would apply to that company as well. Spectrum allocation, Scindia stated, would follow completion of a revenue-based charging framework by the government, with individual operators free to launch services once each had met the prescribed security requirements. A final framework for pricing satcom spectrum is taking shape at both TRAI and the Department of Telecommunications, according to the minister.
Scindia directed criticism at the Congress party during the same period that Rahul Gandhi and Musk were trading posts on X. Scindia contended that the Congress party had taken contradictory stances on the matter — first opposing the granting of a licence to a particular company, then turning around to question why that approval had been withheld — a reversal he described as evidence of deep internal confusion about the party's own direction.
The timing of Musk's remarks about Ambani and India's satellite internet licensing arrangements coincides with the India Mobile Congress, the country's annual telecom gathering, taking place in Delhi.
