By SUZANNE DOWNING
June 13, 2026 – As reports circulate that Elon Musk is the world’s first trillionaire, much of the attention has focused on his staggering wealth. Critics like Sen. Elizabeth Warren see the number and shake their heads. Admirers and free-market champions see something else: a man who built companies that transformed entire industries and solved problems others ignored.
For Alaska, Musk’s most tangible contribution isn’t electric cars or rockets. It’s internet access in the most remote places in America.
When SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service became available across Alaska in late 2022, it fundamentally changed life for thousands of people living in some of the most remote communities in North America. For decades, rural Alaskans struggled with slow, expensive, and often unreliable internet connections. In many villages, residents paid high prices for service that urban Americans would consider barely functional.
Then came Starlink.
Using a constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites, Starlink brought high-speed, low-latency internet to places where laying fiber-optic cable is economically impossible. More than 200 Alaska villages had long lacked the kind of internet service that residents in Anchorage, Fairbanks, or Juneau take for granted.
The breakthrough was possible because SpaceX invested in dedicated polar-orbit satellites, specifically designed to serve high-latitude regions like Alaska. While many technology companies saw the Arctic as too difficult, too expensive, or too remote to bother with, Musk saw opportunity.
Today, Starlink serves homes, schools, tribal organizations, health clinics, fishing operations, lodges, emergency responders, and small businesses throughout Alaska. In communities where weather and geography often isolate residents, reliable broadband has become more than a convenience—it is essential infrastructure.
Telemedicine appointments that once required expensive travel can now happen online. Students can participate in remote learning programs. Businesses can compete in global markets. Emergency communications have become more reliable. Mariners and commercial operators can stay connected far from shore.
The technology has become so widely accepted that Alaska’s largest telecommunications companies have begun incorporating Starlink into their own systems. GCI recently announced integration of Starlink connectivity to enhance resiliency in hub communities including Bethel, Sitka, Kotzebue, and Dillingham.
Even Alaska Airlines has embraced the technology, announcing plans to equip its fleet with Starlink-powered inflight internet service.
The story illustrates something often overlooked in discussions about wealth. Musk did not inherit a trillion-dollar enterprise. He built companies that people voluntarily use because they provide value. Tesla challenged the automotive industry. SpaceX disrupted aerospace. Starlink connected some of the most difficult-to-reach places on Earth.
For Alaska, that last achievement has been a game changer.
Musk has not become a major political donor in the state. There are no SpaceX launch facilities in Alaska, nor Tesla factories. Yet it can be argued that no other private individual has done more to improve daily life for residents of remote Alaska in recent years.
Through Starlink, a businessman born in South Africa identified a problem that governments and telecommunications providers had struggled to solve for decades and delivered a working solution.
In villages beyond the road system, where connectivity once lagged years behind the rest of the country, Starlink helped shrink the digital divide. It connected families, classrooms, clinics, and businesses to the modern world.
12 thoughts on “Before he became world’s first trillionaire, Elon Musk connected rural Alaska to the modern world”
More than 4,400 millionaires were created yesterday due to profit sharing. Everyday Americans doing everyday jobs like welders, janitors, engineers, mariners, and cafeteria workers became millionaires because they worked hard at their jobs and helped to create something.
As more Americans get squeezed by devalued currency and aggressive inflation (not what I voted for), I could care less about the twittering about a dude enriching himself off of government contracts that we pay for with more debt and our increasing poverty.
From far Western Alaska:
“Honey, I couldn’t find any caribou today. Guess I’ll be coming home empty again on my four-wheeler. Could you just use Starlink and order two pizzas for delivery. Hold the anchovies. I got diarrhea with the last delivery. Must have been something in the water. Elon needs to improve on his rural links.”
@willie…..
I know your intent is at humor, but the statement is actually true. Cellphones, satellite phones, laptops. Pizza, burgers, and door dash make rural living pretty damn convenient these days. Migrating caribou is for window dressing only. Build the Line! Build Ambler Road. Build Susitna.
In nature if a monkey hoarded 1 trillion bananas the other monkeys would beat that monkey to death and take his bananas. Instead of discussing how Elon Musk is now the world’s first trillionaire, we should talk about how he killed hundreds of thousands of people through his dismantling of food and medical aid to poor countries during his DOGE stint.
You really don’t understand how capital works, do you, which is why you are talking about monkeys and bananas?
DOGE uncovered fraud, specifically taxpayer $$$ laundered thru the NGO world and right back into the pockets of democrats and their minions.
As an example, ask yourself how the billions of $$$ spent on the homeless the last decade or two benefited the homeless. We spend more, and get more homelessness. OTOH, the $$$ spent does end up electing democrats, like we just saw in LA, which I suppose is the entire point of the exercise. Cheers –
The richest man on Earth dismantled the organization that feeds the poorest children on earth. Where is the outrage from the pro-life community?
He dismantled much more then that.
And if the neocons and MIGA hadn’t hijacked America First much more would thankfully be dismantled.
The right may be is some disaray atm, but mostly everyone hates the hard left. Remember that.
Yet because of a crooked rural legislator whose family owned interest in a cable company, the state and feds spent billions putting down cable for rural internet! Some
Of us where screaming Starlink made the most sense but of course the crooked legislator and family are smiling today.
Yep
It’s certainly not difficult to tell the producers from the takers on this issue.
There’s a well known economic truth known as Schumpeterian Profits or Schumpeterian Rent, it shows that those who create something only slightly profit from their own creation while the rest of society profits greatly from it. Nobel laureate economist William Nordhaus found that in the United States, over more than 50 years, innovators were able to capture around 2 percent of the value their inventions while the value of the other 98 percent went to the rest of us.
The people who refuse to see the contributions Musk has made for all mankind are only fooling themselves.
The only thing missing from this article is that the first licenses Low earth orbit constellation that was designed specifically for Alaska in polar orbit was created by Greg Wyler and OneWeb. Greg refused to take any government money and worked hard to raise it from the private sector. Starlink came two years later and publicly stated they wouldn’t cover Alaska but later did in large part by getting government grants to offset the riskiest stage of business growth in new technology – the development of the technology. I will say Elon is a master at using government money to create vast amounts of wealth.
I am just happy to see you talking about the value of satellite connectivity for our rural communities something I have spent a decade of my life working on for our State and its people.