Elon Musk said Saturday that SpaceX will price Starlink satellite internet affordably in India, pressing a public feud with Mukesh Ambani, the owner of Reliance Jio, days before Jio’s parent company launches the largest initial public offering in the country’s history.
Musk made the pledge in a post on X and gave no price. He wrote that a service too expensive for Indians would find no buyers, so the company has to set rates the market can bear. He added that competition benefits ordinary consumers and that Ambani would lose margin but not his business. “Ambani’s profits will be lower, but he is not going out of business,” Musk wrote.
India’s government has pushed back on the underlying accusation. Telecom Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia told a media briefing on Friday that the country permits no monopoly in any sector, answering a post Musk had published a day earlier asking whether Ambani effectively runs the country. ATN has gathered that Musk offered no evidence for the implication in either post, and that officials describe all three pending applications as sitting at the same stage.
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That process has three applicants waiting at the same stage. Starlink, Jio’s satellite venture and Eutelsat OneWeb’s Indian unit all held licenses as of June, according to an industry trade publication, and all three are waiting on final security clearance from the government. New Delhi has denied any bias in how it is handling them.
Starlink has waited a long time. SpaceX began taking bookings in India in 2021 and was told by authorities to obtain a license first, which started a wait that now runs about four years. Musk has spent this week arguing that unnamed oligarchs are protecting what he called a monopolistic hold over Indian consumers, and late Friday he addressed Ambani directly, asking whether he would allow Starlink to compete.
Reliance has not responded to Musk’s remarks. Jio also has a commercial link to the service it is accused of delaying. According to reporting compiled by ATN, Jio Platforms agreed last year to stock, install and sell Starlink equipment through its retail network once the government approves the service.
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The two sides have already fought over the airwaves. Reliance pressed for satellite spectrum to be auctioned, a position Musk attacked, and the government instead said it would allocate that spectrum administratively. Coverage at the time described the decision as a victory for Starlink.
Jio’s own satellite plans are advancing in parallel. Akash Ambani, the chairman of Reliance Jio, told the India Mobile Congress on October 8 that the company is building an India-made satellite broadband stack and has shown it to the telecom minister. He also said Jio has begun filing early patents for 6G.
The IPO is the immediate commercial backdrop. Jio Platforms, which owns the telecom arm, is targeting a valuation of $106 billion, and market reports put the share sale’s opening date at October 21 and its size near 37,700 crore rupees, or roughly $4 billion to $4.6 billion. Neither the date nor the size could be confirmed against company filings in the material ATN reviewed.
Pricing is where Musk is aiming. Cheap data is the strategy that built Jio, and mobile data in India costs about 7.74 rupees, or $0.08, per gigabyte, among the lowest rates anywhere. Musk has used low pricing before to unsettle established carriers, including in Kenya, and SpaceX has said it intends to enter the mobile carrier market itself, beginning in the United States.
The political temperature has risen as well. The posts mark a sharp turn for Musk, who has long enjoyed a warm public rapport with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and who has now accused Modi’s government of stalling Starlink’s entry into one of the world’s largest internet markets. Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the opposition, answered Musk’s earlier post with a four-word welcome: “Welcome to India, Elon.” Modi has stayed out of the exchange.
The gap in resources between the two men is wide. By the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Musk is worth about $672 billion and Ambani about $84.2 billion. Ambani controls India’s largest mobile operator, which had more than 520 million customers as of March 31, according to Jio’s website, and which competes with Sunil Mittal’s Bharti Airtel for a market of more than a billion internet users.
