A fortune that briefly passed a trillion dollars on Wednesday, a satellite network Poland says it pays for, and on Friday a post explaining who has grown rich off Ukraine.
The first rule of being the richest man alive is that you do not remark on anyone else’s money. Nobody bothers to write it down. It binds hardest in the weeks when your own figure is being read aloud by the financial press, and Elon Musk has just had one of those weeks. He spent the end of it explaining who had grown rich off Ukraine.
On Wednesday 21 October, Forbes reported that he had briefly regained trillionaire status. He peaked at about $1.019 trillion during trading after SpaceX’s third-quarter results, then closed at about $989 billion. Bloomberg’s index had put him at $921 billion the day before. Two days later, on X, the platform he owns, he wrote that Ukraine’s elites “have grown very rich off the hundreds of billions flowing to Ukraine”. A second post said that some American taxpayer money comes back through “multiple laundry machines” to fund political campaigns in America. That, in his telling, was why certain American politicians keep backing Ukraine. He attached no evidence to either post.
Money is the one subject on which the richest person in the room is assumed to be talking about himself, and Musk’s room is unusually empty at the top. When Forbes put him at $1 trillion on 5 October, it had Jeff Bezos in second place at $371.5 billion. Bezos would need to nearly treble his fortune to draw level.
Poland’s foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, replied within the day and quoted the second post back at him. Sikorski has been sending Musk notes of this kind since March 2025, and they have grown more precise with practice. The exchange has been conducted, on his side at least, entirely in public and entirely in writing.
Four-fifths of a fortune in orbit
Forbes reckons Musk owns around 11% of Tesla and 38% of SpaceX. Benzinga values SpaceX at $2.21 trillion and says the rocket company now makes up more than four-fifths of his net worth. The lecture on who has profited from Ukraine therefore comes from a man whose fortune consists mostly of the company that supplies Starlink. Ukraine’s forces rely on that service, and in March 2025 Musk himself called it the “backbone of the Ukrainian army”.
The fortune also moves around a good deal. He first crossed $1 trillion on 12 June, when SpaceX opened on Nasdaq at $135 a share and lifted him to about $1.1 trillion. Within days, a 31% multi-day selloff in the shares had taken him back under the line. Forbes had him over it again on Monday 5 October, under it by the Thursday, and over it once more on the Friday morning, 9 October. Wednesday’s visit lasted part of a single trading session.
None of this disqualifies Musk from having views on Ukraine, on aid or on the politics of either. It does put him in a position familiar to anyone who has sat on a charity board, which is that of having an interest to declare. In polite company, anyone with an invoice in the matter mentions it before discussing the other guests’ finances. Musk’s posts mentioned the elites, the hundreds of billions and the laundry machines, and left his own company out of the account.
The customer has been keeping receipts
Poland’s view of the arrangement is simpler, because Poland says it pays. In March 2025, Sikorski said Ukraine’s Starlink service was paid for by the Polish Digitisation Ministry at about $50 million a year, and that Poland had supplied half of the country’s 42,000 terminals. Musk told him at the time to “Be quiet, small man”, and Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, accused Sikorski of “making things up”.
The $50 million is a minister’s figure rather than an audited contract value, and Sikorski has kept repeating it. On 12 August this year he told Musk to “stop discriminating Polish users of Starlink” over new Starlink Roam terms for Poles from 17 August. He added that Poland might rethink the $50 million a year it pays him. Krzysztof Gawkowski, Poland’s digital minister, had raised the same changes. That puts Poland in the unusual position of being both a critic of the service and, by its own account, one of the parties paying for it.
Then, in October, came the cap on Ukraine’s military terminals. On 14 October, SpaceX restricted speeds on Starshield, the military version of Starlink, in Ukraine. Serhii Beskrestnov, an adviser to Ukraine’s president, confirmed the limit the same day. According to Polskie Radio24, the military terminals stopped giving connectivity above 160 km/h. Volodymyr Zelensky said on 17 October that a 161 km/h limit remained, and on 22 October a Ukrainian official said nothing had changed.
Who decided on the cap is still disputed. The Wall Street Journal reported on 20 October that Musk ordered it. According to Snopes, Donald Trump said he and Musk had “nothing to do” with the decision. The Telegraph reported that both men had a hand in it, and Rzeczpospolita says SpaceX and the White House give differing versions of events. The argument over the cap is therefore also an argument about who answers for a product that a government says it pays for.
Sikorski’s message on 14 October was one any account manager would recognise. As Kyiv Post reported, he reminded Musk that Europeans were his customers and told him “we are watching you”. Nobody is more polite than a customer who has started counting.
A reply in the correct register
Which brings us to Friday. Sikorski answered the laundry machines by saying that the United States had stopped funding Ukraine last year, and that purchases of American weapons are now financed by European states. “U.S. companies make money on American weapons for which we Europeans pay,” he wrote. That is his claim, and there is context for it: Liga.net notes that under the PURL programme, launched in 2025, NATO members fund the weapons they buy from the United States for Ukraine. He finished by warning that the more Musk plays “politics with your products”, the more he damages his own brand.
As a piece of manners, the reply is very good, and mostly for reasons of form. It answers a claim about money with a claim about who pays, which is the only rebuttal that ever lands in an argument among the very rich. It stays on the products, the brand and the bill. It names no one and accuses no one of laundering anything. It is also the reply of a customer, and a customer may tell a supplier what he thinks of the service without anyone mistaking it for a sermon. Sikorski’s figures, whatever their exact accuracy, concern what governments pay suppliers, while Musk’s concern what other people have pocketed.
Musk’s posts did what the first rule forbids. They told a very large audience, on his own platform, that other people had grown very rich. He did so in a week when Forbes had briefly valued him above a trillion dollars, his fourth crossing of that line since June. The richest man alive is entitled to his opinions on Ukraine, on aid and on Washington. The subject he gives up, by the arithmetic of his own position, is other people getting rich.
As of 22 October, Kyiv said the cap on its military terminals had not moved. Poland says it is still paying the subscription.
