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Join today<\/a><\/p>\n \n Already a member? Elon Musk<\/a> escalated his public dispute <\/a>with Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani<\/a> by sharing news reports about his donations to prime minister Narendra Modi\u2019s party, furthering a row that started with the American tech mogul lashing out at \u201coligarchs\u201d for blocking his satellite internet service in the South Asian nation.<\/p>\n In an X<\/a> post on Saturday, Mr Musk highlighted two reports linking Mr Ambani\u2019s Reliance conglomerate to donations received by Mr Modi\u2019s BJP. <\/p>\n One was a 2022 Al Jazeera<\/a> investigation titled \u201cHow a Reliance-funded firm boosts BJP<\/a>‘s campaigns on Facebook<\/a>“, and the other a 2024 Indian Express<\/a> report that Qwik Supply, a company linked to Reliance, had donated \u00a330m to the BJP and \u00a32m to one of its regional allies, Shiv Sena<\/a>, through electoral bonds, which allowed individuals and companies to fund political parties anonymously by buying bonds from the State Bank of India. <\/p>\n The Supreme Court<\/a> struck the funding system down as unconstitutional in 2024, following which the election commission<\/a> published data about who bought and cashed the bonds. <\/p>\n That data showed Qwik Supply bought \u00a332m of bonds between 2021-22 and 2023-24, making it the third-largest buyer. <\/p>\n A spokesperson for Mr Ambani\u2019s conglomerate told the PTI news agency<\/a> in March 2024 that Qwik Supply \u201cwasn\u2019t a subsidiary of any Reliance entity”. However, according to Reuters, company filings showed three Reliance firms together held a 50.04 per cent stake in Qwik Supply.<\/p>\n The Al Jazeera news report cited by Mr Musk said a news start-up funded by Reliance had run political advertisements promoting the BJP on Facebook and Instagram<\/a>. <\/p>\n Reliance was still to publicly respond to Mr Musk’s latest posts.<\/p>\n The posts followed a week of escalating remarks by Mr Musk about his company SpaceX\u2019s wait for approval to deploy its Starlink satellite broadband in India. <\/p>\n On Wednesday, he declared on X, which he also owns, that Starlink was “being blocked by certain oligarchs in order to maintain their monopolistic chokehold on the Indian people”. <\/p>\n \u201cYou can guess who they are,\u201d he added. He was widely understood in India to refer to Mr Ambani and fellow billionaire Sunil Mittal. Mr Ambani\u2019s Jio and Mr Mittal\u2019s Airtel control nearly 80 per cent of the broadband market in India in what\u2019s a virtual duopoly. <\/p>\n On Thursday, Mr Musk took it up a notch by naming Mr Ambani. <\/p>\n \u201cStarlink is licensed in over 165 countries and has spent five years complying with every single law and requirement of the government of India, so why still no license?\u201d he said on X. \u201cIs Ambani the real boss of India?”<\/p>\n
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