Photo credit: Steve Jurvetson / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 2.0
Elon Musk’s attack on India’s “oligarchs” is unproven. But the question behind it is fair, and India should answer it.
Elon Musk has made a serious claim with no evidence. He says “oligarchs” are blocking Starlink in India. Then he asked, on X, whether Mukesh Ambani is “the real boss of India.”
He hasn’t shown that anyone is blocking Starlink. India’s government says Starlink, Reliance’s satellite venture and OneWeb are all at the same stage of approval. Rahul Gandhi’s reply, “Wait till you discover the other guy,” named no one. And Musk’s answer, “This is indeed troubling,” added no facts.
So let’s be careful about what we don’t know. We don’t know that Ambani has done anything to stop Starlink.
But Musk’s post touched a nerve for a reason. Behind it is a question that has nothing to do with Musk: how much of India’s economy should one company control?
One company, almost everywhere
Reliance Industries began as a textiles business. Today, it’s in almost every part of Indian life.
It runs one of the world’s largest oil refining complexes, in Jamnagar. It owns India’s biggest retail chain. Through Jio, it is India’s largest mobile operator. After its 2024 merger with Disney’s India business, it owns one of the country’s biggest TV and streaming groups. It’s also in renewable energy, financial services and now satellite internet.
None of this is illegal. Building big businesses isn’t a crime. But when one group is this large in so many markets at once, it gains a kind of power that ordinary competition can’t easily check: influence over prices, over suppliers, over what people watch, and a louder voice when the rules are being written.
What happened to India’s mobile market
The clearest example is telecom.
When Jio launched in 2016, it offered free data and calls for months, then some of the cheapest mobile data in the world. Hundreds of millions of Indians got online for the first time. That was a real good, and Reliance deserves credit for it.
But the price war also cleared the field. India once had around a dozen mobile companies. Within a few years, most had shut down, sold out or merged. Today, the private market is mainly three players, and one of them, Vodafone Idea, has struggled to survive.
Cheap data was good for customers in the short run. A market with fewer competitors is a risk in the long run. When there are few choices, the companies that remain have less reason to keep prices low or service good.
Reliance and satellite internet
Satellite internet could bring real competition to Indian broadband, especially in villages that cables and towers don’t reach. And Reliance has not been a neutral bystander.
In October 2024, Reliance wrote to India’s telecom minister, arguing that satellite spectrum should be auctioned rather than handed out, a letter first reported by Reuters. Reliance said an auction was needed for “a level playing field,” because foreign satellite companies could compete with traditional telecom firms. Bharti Airtel’s Sunil Mittal backed the auction route too.
An auction would have made it much more expensive for newcomers like Starlink to enter India. The government disagreed. “Spectrum for satcomm is shared spectrum, and cannot be auctioned,” Communications Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia said, according to TechCrunch.
That was lobbying, and lobbying is legal. But it shows where the big telecom companies’ interests lie: in making entry harder for rivals.
To be clear, this is a separate question from today’s delay. There’s no evidence that Reliance’s lobbying in 2024 is the reason Starlink is still waiting in 2026.
The other side
Fairness demands the full picture.
Reliance Jio is also a Starlink partner. In 2025, it signed a deal, as did Bharti Airtel, to sell Starlink’s service in India. And Reliance’s own satellite venture is, by the government’s account, waiting in the same queue as Starlink.
There’s also an irony worth noting. Elon Musk is not a small challenger. Starlink runs thousands of satellites, far more than any rival anywhere in the world. A Starlink-dominated satellite market would raise its own monopoly worries. Swapping one giant for another doesn’t give India real competition.
What India should do
The answer isn’t to attack any one businessman. It’s to make sure no company, Indian or foreign, can grow so large that it shapes the rules for everyone else.
That means a stronger Competition Commission of India. The commission can already punish companies that abuse a dominant position, and it must approve large mergers. But its cases often take years, and it looks at one market at a time. It needs the speed and the power to look at companies that are big in several markets at once.
It also means approval processes, like the one Starlink is stuck in, that are transparent, with clear timelines that anyone can check. And it means making sure there are more than two or three real choices for India’s customers, in mobile, in broadband and in satellite internet.
The government says its satellite process is fair. If so, it should show it: publish the timeline, explain the delays, and let the public see that no company, however powerful, is getting special treatment.
The real question
Musk asked whether Ambani is “the real boss of India.” He offered no proof, and the question, as he put it, is unfair.
But a better version of it is worth asking: in a country of 1.4 billion people, is it healthy for so much economic power to sit with so few companies?
That question doesn’t need Elon Musk to answer it. It needs India to.
By The Lion Capital Editorial Team | October 2026