Tech billionaire Elon Musk has been in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin since late 2022, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

According to the Journal's intelligence sources, Musk and Putin continued to have talks into this year, even as Musk began to ramp up his criticism of U.S. military support for Ukraine and became actively involved in the election campaign of Republican candidate and former President Donald Trump.

Putin once asked the entrepreneur to avoid activating his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese President Xi Jinping, two people briefed on the request said.

The bombshell claims land at a critical time in the U.S. election campaign, but the businessman's influence extends far beyond politics, via his social network platform X and his tech company SpaceX, through which he has megabucks government contracts and high-level security clearance to classified U.S. information.

His Starlink satellite internet service highlights a key aspect of Musk's influence: The billionaire gave Ukraine free access to his system after Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

It was hailed as an important tool in Ukraine's ability to fight back against Russian forces, but relations between Musk and Ukrainian authorities cooled over the course of the war, and Musk stopped funding the terminals for Ukraine and even restricted its military's use of Starlink to control drones. 

In October 2022, Musk also began tweeting a series of Kremlin talking points about the war, which he presented as a plan for peace, but triggered major pushback from top officials in Kyiv, even from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself.

In early 2024, Ukrainian military intelligence reports said that Musk's satellite service was being used by the Russian army on the Ukrainian front.

According to Putin's spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin's only communication with Musk was a phone call in which he and Putin discussed "space, as well as current and future technologies."

"It's all untrue, absolutely false information published in the newspaper," Peskov then told journalists in Moscow on Friday.

Knowledge of Musk's Kremlin contacts appears to be a closely held secret in the U.S. administration, according to The Wall Street Journal, and several White House officials said they were unaware of them. 

Musk has not yet responded to the reports, and he did not respond to The Wall Street Journal's requests for comment. 

Politico

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