As Elon Musk weighs in on India’s Starlink approval process, journalist and commentator S Gurumurthy has questioned the Tesla CEO’s motives, saying he cannot be trusted with access to India’s critical communications infrastructure.
As Elon Musk weighs in on India’s Starlink approval process, journalist and commentator S Gurumurthy has questioned the Tesla CEO’s motives, saying he cannot be trusted with access to India’s critical communications infrastructure. In a post on X, Gurumurthy accused Musk of playing politics in India, citing his involvement in political affairs in the US, Europe and the UK.
“You, Mr Musk, are playing politics in India, which, as a foreigner, you are supposed to do. If you play politics, how can we trust you and allow you into our communication domain, which is critical to our national security,” Gurumurthy said in a post on Saturday.
“You have a record of entering deep into Presidential politics in the US in 2024 and also in the EU and UK. We can’t trust you, who seems to me more a politician than a businessman,” he said.
Gurumuthy was responding to a post by Sridhar Vembu, a scientist and former CEO of Zoho Corporation, who pointed to the duplicity of Musk’s post. *Vembu* mentioned that India has among the lowest data prices and that Tesla is protected from Chinese EV competition in the United States.
More from World“Prime Minister Modi has worked hard to create a competitive economy where the benefits flow to the average Indian. His government does not tolerate monopolies. He has also actively promoted and encouraged a massive surge in startups, and that is the best signal of a highly competitive economy,” Vembu wrote in the post.
Musk’s tendency to interfere in political affairs of different nations
Gurumurthy said that Musk tends to get involved in presidential politics is the fact that the trillionaire spent over a quarter of a billion dollars to help current US President Donald Trump to win the 2024 presidential race.
He gave a whopping $259 million to groups supporting Trump’s 2024 campaign, according to new Federal Election Commission filings. The huge donations made Musk one of the biggest underwriters of a presidential campaign in US history, helping him to become a powerful political ally of Trump and someone who now plays a key role in shaping the incoming Republican administration’s policy agenda.
He meddled in European affairs as well. For instance, in the United Kingdom, Musk has variously claimed Britain was a “tyrannical police state” and called then-prime minister Keir Starmer “two-tier Keir” over allegations of judicial discrimination against right-wingers, and described new farm inheritance tax rules as the UK “going full Stalin”.
The SpaceX CEO went on to ask British monarch King Charles III to dissolve Parliament and claimed Starmer should be in jail for his alleged part in the grooming gangs scandal, calling the prime minister “utterly despicable” and “deeply complicit in mass rapes in exchange for votes”.
Weeks before general elections in Germany, Musk drew backlash with a remark on X about the far-right Alternative für Deutschland, claiming “only the AfD can save Germany”, then an op-ed for Welt am Sonntag saying it was “clearly false” to call the party extreme.
Soon after that, he hosted a livestream on X with Alice Weidel in which he heaped praise on the anti-immigrant, pro-Kremlin AfD co-leader, repeated his claim that the party was Germany’s only hope, while Weidel said that Adolf Hitler was a communist.
He has also intervened in Ireland, claiming in a post prompted by an anti-immigration rally in Dublin that “the people of Ireland are standing up for themselves” and promising to use X to fund legal challenges to planned hate speech legislation.
