Elon Musk’s Starlink is increasingly facing competition from China’s SpaceSail. Meanwhile, Trump’s new “energy Tsar” has said that Washington is doomed to lose the “AI arms race” without fossil fuels. Energy production does seem to be a priority for the new administration: one may recall that in his famous interview with news-host Sean Hannity, Donald Trump said he wanted to “drill, drill, drill!”. What do these pieces of news have to do with Trump’s hunger for minerals in Ukraine and even elsewhere, considering his plans for Greenland and so on?

Well, to make sense of so many measures and plans carried out by Trump, one needs to keep in mind 1) how much the business interests of Big Tech oligarchs align with Washington interests—not just Trump’s; 2) the fact there there is an AI race going on; and 3) the extent to which AI and similar industries heavily rely on energy and minerals.

The truth is that Musk’s SpaceX, Starlink and Tesla, as well as his other enterprises, are increasingly a driving force for US soft power. In fact the very distinction between “soft” and “hard” power might get blurry sometimes, as Musk himself is on the record boasting of his (or the US) alleged capacity to conduct coup d’etats. He once tweeted: “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” (note how Musk said “we”, in an ambiguous enough manner).

Interestingly, the context of this provocative remark, in 2020, was a response to an allegation that Washington and Musk’s Tesla business interests were plotting a coup against Bolivian leader Evo Morales, to “get lithium” there—lithium being of course a key mineral for capacitors for electronics, smartphones, computers and the like.

In a way, Elon Musk’s web of enterprises are the very face of a sector of the so-called “deep state”, which goes to suggest that Trump’s war “against the deep state” is more accurately a war against a faction of it. Former diplomat and academic Peter Dale Scott has defined the American “deep state” as........

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