Elon Musk has been in regular contact with Vladimir Putin and his aides since late 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The billionaire has held secret conversations with the Russian president and other top officials—including one tasked with spreading Russian disinformation on Musk’s social media platform X—about business, geopolitics and personal matters, current and former officials from the U.S., Europe, and Russia told the Journal.
The report is alarming on several fronts, as Musk has taken on an outsized role in former President Donald Trump’s campaign for re-election. He holds top-secret clearance as the head of SpaceX, which launches satellites that are vital to U.S. national security, and he owns X, a social media platform with 600 million active users.
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One of his Russian contacts was Putin’s first deputy chief of staff, Sergei Kiriyenko, whom the U.S. Justice Department has accused of creating 30 internet domains to spread disinformation, including on X, according to the Wall Street Journal.
It’s not clear from the report whether Musk was already talking to the Russians when he was in the process of buying X, formerly Twitter, in the fall of 2022. But since the contact started, he’s begun criticizing U.S. military aid in Ukraine, allowed Russian disinformation to run rampant on X and become Trump’s second-biggest campaign booster.
Musk didn’t respond to the Wall Street Journal’s requests for comment, but after the article came out, he replied to a post on X from political commentator Keith Olbermann saying Musk was operating on behalf of Russia and needed to be detained “immediately.”
“Olbermann has achieved the impossible,” Musk wrote, before referring to Olbermann by an offensive slur. “SpaceX is the primary communication system of the Ukrainian military on the front lines, because everything else has been destroyed or jammed by the Russians!”
He didn’t deny having contact with Putin, though.
When Russia first invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Musk posted messages of support to Kyiv on Twitter and donated 15,000 of his company’s Starlink terminals to provide internet access in areas where Russian bombs had wiped out Ukraine’s communications infrastructure.
As the war progressed, however, Russia began putting both public and private pressure on Musk and making implicit threats, the Wall Street Journal reported. By September 2022, apparently around the time his conversations with Putin began, Musk was limiting how Ukraine’s military could use the Starlink terminals.
Earlier this year, the world’s richest man began criticizing U.S. military aid to Ukraine—a common Trump campaign talking point—and in July he announced he would spearhead a massive push to get Trump re-elected.
Over the past three months, Musk has funneled more than $122 million to pro-Trump super PACs, and has been stumping for him in the crucial battleground state of Pennsylvania. If Trump wins, Musk is likely to get a government appointment in return.
Asked by the Wall Street Journal for comment on the ties between Putin and Musk, a Trump campaign spokeswoman praised Musk as a “once-in-a-generation industry leader.” She also repeated Trump’s standard line that the war in Ukraine will suddenly and inexplicably end if Trump gets elected because of “strength” and “deterrence.”
According to veteran journalist Bob Woodward, Trump has had at least seven conversations with Putin since leaving office—claims the Republican presidential candidate has denied even while saying such calls would be a “smart thing” to do. He has long expressed his admiration for the authoritarian leader, even going so far as to call the war in Ukraine “genius.”
