About Starlink Watch

Why this exists

Starlink now carries internet traffic for armies, governments, aid agencies and millions of households in well over a hundred countries. X is one of the main places where political news breaks. Both are controlled by one person, who also comments daily on elections, leaders and judges around the world, and who has at times decided where Starlink works and where it does not. That concentration of private power over public infrastructure and public debate deserves a careful, public record.

The aim is not to collect insults or outrage. It is to set down, with sources, what was said and done, how governments responded and what happened next, so that readers, reporters and officials can check the pattern for themselves.

What we record

• The Musk tracker (211 entries): statements and actions by Elon Musk, or by his companies under his direction, that intervene in a country's elections, government, courts or regulation, the United States included, and decisions to switch Starlink or X on or off in disputes and conflicts.
• Courts and regulators: licence refusals, bans, fines, seizures and lawsuits involving Starlink around the world, with their latest known status.
• Reported Starlink problems (4966 reports): outages, price rises, billing disputes and other problems customers and the press have reported, found partly by a daily automatic search.
• Analysis: clearly labelled commentary that draws on the record.

Who runs it

Starlink Watch is run by an independent editor. Contact details are below.

Starlink Watch is not affiliated with Starlink, SpaceX, X, Tesla or any government or political party, and takes no advertising or payment from them. Contact: corrections@starlinkwatch.com.

Editorial standards

• Every claim has a source. Entries link to reporting by established news organisations, official statements or court records. We prefer at least two independent sources.
• Fact and opinion are kept apart. Tracker entries and reports use neutral, attributed wording: what was said, by whom, and the response. Interpretation appears only in pieces labelled Analysis.
• Exact words only. Quotes appear only where a source shows the exact wording; otherwise we paraphrase and say so.
• The other side. Where a government, court, fact-checker, Musk or his companies responded publicly, we include it. Anyone named can send a statement through the corrections page, and relevant responses are added.
• Checked before publication. Every tracker entry is checked against its sources, including the exact wording of quotes and the dates, before it is published.
• Corrections. Mistakes are corrected in place, and significant corrections are noted.

What an entry is, and is not

A tracker entry records that a statement was made or an action taken, as reported by the linked sources. It is not an accusation by this site that anyone broke a law. A reported Starlink problem means a problem was publicly reported, not that it was proven.

Where the problem reports come from

• Editor research going back to 2022, marked Verified.
• Daily news search in each country's own Google News edition and language, plus the GDELT Project, US court dockets on CourtListener and, as low-confidence leads only, Reddit.
• Reader tips, checked by an editor before they appear.

Reports found by the news search are labelled From the news and link to their sources; reports an editor has checked against those sources are labelled Verified. Low-confidence matches (Possible) are not shown or counted. Countries with more online news produce more reports, so counts are not a measure of service quality.

Pictures and embedded posts

Posts on X and YouTube videos are shown with the platforms' official embeds, as the author's own words. Some reports show the preview image a source article published for link sharing; it loads from the publisher's site and is never copied here.

Your privacy

We count visits to understand which pages are read, without cookies and without storing IP addresses. Each visitor is represented by a code that changes every day and cannot be traced back to a person. We do not use advertising or third-party trackers. Embedded posts from X or YouTube load from those platforms, which apply their own policies.

Known limits

• The tracker covers events with substantial coverage and a documented response; it is a record, not every post Musk has written.
• Free news search is thinner before 2024, so 2022–2023 is less complete.
• Automatic matching makes mistakes. Use the correction link on any page to flag one.