Elon Musk's Starlink feud with billionaire Mukesh Ambani draws in Sunil Mittal

American billionaire Elon Musk's week-long public fight with Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani over Starlink's stalled launch in India drew in another of the country's telecom tycoons on Wednesday, when Bharti Enterprises founder Sunil Bharti Mittal said his satellite venture should be cleared before Musk's.

Mittal, whose Bharti group controls Bharti Airtel, India's second-largest mobile operator, said Eutelsat OneWeb applied for permission years before SpaceX's Starlink and is still waiting. Bharti is a major shareholder in the satellite operator.

Speaking on a panel at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum, Mittal said OneWeb was "significantly ahead of him in the queue because we applied five years ago," according to Business Standard. "Our ground networks have been ready for the past three years," he said, adding that "our satellites have been hovering over India for the past five years." He said: "We still do not have the necessary permission."

He added that OneWeb would be "very happy to receive it, even a few days before him."

A week of posts on X

The comments added a third billionaire voice to a dispute that Musk started on Oct. 7, when he said unnamed "oligarchs" were blocking Starlink to protect their businesses. A day later he asked his followers on X, "Is Ambani the real boss of India?"

On Oct. 9 he addressed the Reliance Industries chairman directly. "Dear Prime Minister Ambani, Please accept my humble apologies for not realising that you are the real boss of India," Musk wrote, according to the Press Trust of India. He went on: "Naturally, you would prefer to maintain your monopolistic exploitation of the great people of India," TechCrunch reported, before asking whether Ambani would allow Starlink to compete.

Over the weekend Musk shared screenshots of media reports alleging that a Reliance-funded firm had helped boost social media campaigns for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party, and that a Reliance-linked company had made large electoral bond donations to the party. He also promised that SpaceX would price Starlink affordably in India and dismissed critics who said it could not compete with Reliance Jio's cheap data. "Ambani's profits will be lower, but he is not going out of business," he wrote.

Reliance, which owns Jio, India's largest mobile operator, has not publicly responded to Musk's remarks or to the reports he shared, according to Reuters and the Press Trust of India.

Government denies bias

India's Ministry of Communications has rejected Musk's claims. It said last week that its satellite rules were "fair and non-discriminatory" and that Starlink, Jio's satellite venture with Luxembourg's SES and OneWeb were at "broadly the same regulatory stage," with all three undergoing security assessments before spectrum is assigned. Communications Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia said India "does not allow a monopoly in any sector."

The approval records support part of Mittal's case. OneWeb received its satellite communications licence in April 2022 and clearance from the space regulator IN-SPACe in November 2023, Business Standard reported. Jio's satellite unit got its licence in October 2022. Starlink was licensed in 2025. Lauren Dreyer, a SpaceX vice president, said on Oct. 7 that the company had spent five years building its India operations, including 20 gateways.

On Tuesday, Swadeshi Jagran Manch, the economic wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Hindu nationalist organization that is the ideological parent of Modi's party, urged the government to block Starlink altogether on national security grounds, Arab News reported. The group has previously shaped Indian rules that restrict Amazon and Walmart's Flipkart. SpaceX did not immediately respond to the outlet's request for comment.

Rubio heads to Jamnagar

The row is playing out days before U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio travels to India. The State Department said on Tuesday that Rubio will visit Mumbai and Jamnagar from Oct. 17 to Oct. 22 to discuss energy cooperation and meet business leaders, according to Business Standard. Jamnagar, in Gujarat, is home to Reliance's refinery, the world's largest single-site refining complex, with capacity to process 1.4 million barrels of crude a day.

The visit puts a senior member of the Trump administration at Ambani's flagship plant while Musk attacks his telecom business. Reliance is also an investor in a planned refinery in Brownsville, Texas, that President Donald Trump announced in March.

The dispute lands a week before Jio Platforms, Reliance's telecom and digital arm, opens India's largest initial public offering on Oct. 21.

Ambani, 69, is Asia's richest person with a fortune of about $100 billion, according to Forbes. Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla, is the world's richest person.