Elon Musk Picks a Fight With India’s Richest Man Srividya Kalyanaraman Mon, October 12, 2026 at 1:06 PM EDT 2 min read NVDA -1.22% RELIANCE Trade NVIDIA on Coinbase Trading disclosure Trading disclosure The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational.
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Elon Musk is picking fights again. This time, it's with India's richest man, Mukesh Ambani, over the Starlink launch. He also picked the time strategically: Musk said Starlink will be priced affordably in India, days before Jio's parent launches India's largest IPO. Affordable, in India's case, is practically free.
Here's the background: Both Starlink and Jio's satellite arm (run by Ambani) are awaiting the same final security clearance. Musk is mad that the Modi government might be biased towards Jio, and hence the delays. The government denies bias and says all three satellite ventures await final security clearance.
Musk took his frustrations to X, the platform he owns.
"The reality is that competition would greatly benefit the average citizen in India by giving them more choices, as it always does," he wrote on Saturday. "Ambani's profits will be lower, but he is not going out of business."
Indian mobile data costs about ₹7.74 ($0.08) per gigabyte, among the world's lowest. So when Musk gives no price comparison for "affordable," it's not clear what he means, because Starlink's U.S. home plan starts around $120 a month. And Jio's and Airtel-backed OneWeb's satellite services would cost anywhere between $5 and $10. That's hard to beat.
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The timing matters. Jio Platforms is set to go public on October 21, as India's largest-ever IPO, reportedly raising ₹37,700 crore ($3.8 billion).
Starlink's application sat in process from November 2022 before the telecom license arrived in June of last year. But what makes the situation trickier is that Starlink also partners with Jio and Airtel, and Starlink signed two separate distribution deals with Jio and Airtel last year. That said, India's internet market is fair game for every player. Both Jio and Airtel work with Starlink's European rivals as well.
Meanwhile, India's Department of Telecommunications added 29 regulations for satellite operators in May, and spectrum is still unallocated.
Musk also hinted at Ambani's clout with the Modi administration, calling him "Prime Minister Ambani," though the government claims this is a fair and equal process of selection.
Starlink says it will announce pricing only after all approvals and spectrum allocation. There's still no word from New Delhi on the security clearance timeline. Up next on the watchlist: if investors price the Jio IPO with the competition in mind.
