For the past week, President Donald Trump and his aides have traded accusations with Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, over who restricted Ukraine’s access to a military-grade version of Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite network product that Ukrainian forces depend on to intercept incoming Russian projectiles and target Russian launchers.

Musk blamed Trump and the U.S. military for the decision, writing on X, “Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.” Trump insisted that his administration did not disrupt Ukraine’s access to the network. Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued that decisions about Ukraine’s access to the network were in the hands of SpaceX and Musk and not the White House. The Wall Street Journal and CBS News reported that the decision had been Musk’s.

On Mar. 9, 2025, Musk had promised that, whatever his disagreements with U.S. policy toward Ukraine, “Starlink will never turn off its terminals. We would never do such a thing or use it as a bargaining chip.” Critics have raced to blame Musk alone, casting him as the puppeteer behind the throne, the first business titan to achieve what William Randolph Hearst, Marcus Alonzo Hanna, and J.P. Morgan only aspired to: a latter-day Cornelius Vanderbilt, who is reputed to have scoffed, “Law? What do I care about the law? Hain’t I got the power?”

That gets the story backward. Musk’s businesses are uniquely dependent on the blessings of Washington: a fifth of SpaceX’s revenue comes directly from federal agencies, its satellites require federal authorization to launch and operate, and the possible merger of Tesla and SpaceX will live or die by the decisions of federal regulators.

Confronted with a White House that appeared determined to squeeze Ukraine, whatever its public denials, Musk faced a familiar choice for anyone dependent on political patronage: capitulate, resist, or retreat into ambiguity. He chose ambiguity, revealing the limits of his power. The wealthiest man in the world still answers to someone else.

The finger-pointing creates a haze of ambiguity, giving both men plausible deniability. The apparent aim is to force Ukraine into a settlement by depriving it of the means to resist: a way to secure a quick, short-term peace and lower oil prices at the expense of Ukrainian sovereignty and international law.

But that calculation mistakes capitulation for stability. Rewarding President Vladimir Putin of Russia could encourage him to test NATO’s resolve in the Baltic states, Poland, Finland, or Sweden, raising the risk of a direct confrontation with the alliance. It would also signal to other U.S. adversaries that sufficient pressure can fold Washington’s commitments.

For now, Trump could claim to have brokered peace between Russia and Ukraine, even if the peace he delivers is the silence of a defeated country. Musk can evade responsibility by presenting himself as merely one supplier among many across the defense industry whose failures have weakened Ukraine’s defenses. He could point to weapons manufacturer RTX, whose Patriot interceptors are so scarce that Ukraine reportedly ran out of them this month, or to delays in delivering F-16s manufactured by Lockheed Martin that were promised two years earlier.

Faustian bargains

Beneath the public quarrel lies a familiar pattern: surrender political independence and retain the freedom to accumulate extraordinary wealth. The historians who have studied Putin’s Russia most closely would recognize the pattern instantly. Timothy Snyder has written that Russia’s oligarchs “were tamed, but not by a neutral state.” Rather, “Putin himself became the head oligarch, the boss of bosses.” Anne Applebaum echoed the insight and described Putin as making himself “godfather to all of the other oligarchs.”

Putin laid out the terms of that bargain on Jul. 28, 2000, when he met with 21 of Russia's richest men in the Kremlin, less than three months after his inauguration. The message was simple. The fortunes they had amassed in the chaos of the 1990s were theirs to keep, as long as they stayed out of politics entirely. Keep your distance from power, and the state would leave you alone.

Those who refused the deal faced immediate reprisals. Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, whose television networks refused to bend the knee, were driven into exile within the year. Gusinsky’s NTV was seized by state-controlled Gazprom. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then Russia’s richest man, funded opposition parties and lectured the Kremlin on corruption. In Oct. 2003 he was pulled off his plane at a Siberian airport and arrested. He spent a decade in prison and watched his oil company, Yukos, dismantled and its assets transferred to state-controlled companies.

Those who accepted the deal are the ones who got rich, and they have never been richer. Forbes counted a record 155 Russian billionaires this year, the fourth straight year that number has grown, with a combined fortune of $696.5 billion—up 11% from the previous year, even as Putin’s war against Ukraine entered its fifth year. Their collective wealth reportedly now exceeds the bank term deposits of the rest of Russia’s population: 155 oligarchs with fortunes greater than the savings of roughly 146 million ordinary Russians.

“Oligarchies are unstable,” Snyder has observed. “Members disappear.” For those who might have forgotten the terms of Putin’s bargain, an instructive reminder came in 2023, when Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Group, did the one thing the bargain forbade: he challenged the Kremlin’s authority. Prigozhin seized a military headquarters in Rostov-on-Don and sent his forces toward Moscow. His column advanced to within 125 miles of the capital before he agreed to stand down under a deal brokered by Aleksandr Lukashenko, the Belarusian dictator.

Putin publicly called the mutiny treason, then appeared to forgive him. Two months later, on Aug. 23, 2023, Prigozhin’s private jet crashed north of Moscow, killing everyone aboard. The Kremlin denied involvement, the U.S. intelligence concluded that the plane had been blown up, and The Wall Street Journal later reported that the operation had been ordered by Putin’s Security Council chief. Putin’s eulogy, delivered the next day, described Prigozhin as a man who had “made serious mistakes in life.” No oligarch in Russia needed the rest of the sentence spelled out.

Prigozhin’s fate is only the most spectacular entry on a longer, murkier list. Since the invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, at least 85 Russian businessmen and officials have reportedly died in unexplained or violent circumstances, many of them figures in the energy industry. Among the dead are three Lukoil executives: board member Alexander Subbotin, who died in May 2022 after a visit to a “shaman” outside Moscow; chairman Ravil Maganov, who fell from a sixth-floor window that September; and vice president Vitaly Robertus, who was found dead in his office in March 2024.

In April 2022, two former energy and banking executives were found dead alongside their families. Vladislav Avayev, a former Gazprombank vice president, was found shot dead in his Moscow apartment with his wife and 13-year-old daughter. Sergei Protosenya, a former Novatek executive, was found hanged at a rented villa in Lloret de Mar, Spain, with his wife and daughter stabbed to death inside. Catalan police concluded that Protosenya had killed his family, then himself. His son rejected that finding, insisting that his father had been in good spirits and had no reasons to kill them and himself.

Transneft vice president Andrei Badalov fell from a 17th-floor window in July 2025. The Moscow Times has counted 18 such fatal falls from windows since 2002. Three days later, Russia’s transport minister, Roman Starovoit, was found shot dead in his car hours after Putin fired him. Another transport official died of supposedly acute heart failure the same day. 

A shadow over America

Putin’s Russia offers an extreme and grotesque example of the bargain. Yet some critics see an emerging American version, in a far less violent form. Snyder and Applebaum have warned that Western billionaires risk repeating the mistakes of Russia’s oligarchs under Boris Yeltsin, believing they can manage a strongman for profit, only to discover that he is managing them.

Musk spent more than $277 million to help elect Donald Trump, took a desk in the West Wing, and ran the Department of Government Efficiency like a man who believed he was co-president. When that arrangement flamed out in May 2025, he tried to exercise independent political power by turning against Trump, calling his signature legislation, the Big Beautiful Bill, a “disgusting abomination.” Musk threatened to form a third political party and then briefly launched one. He even taunted Trump about Jeffrey Epstein, posting that the president “is in the Epstein files.”

After Trump publicly mused about terminating his contracts, Musk quickly retreated. He deleted the posts, and conceded that they “went too far.” He returned to the fold, shook Trump’s hand at Charlie Kirk’s memorial, accepted the National Medal of Science from him this month, and became the biggest known donor of the 2026 midterms, giving at least $366 million to Republican groups. He has grown vastly richer in the process: SpaceX’s June IPO made him the world’s first trillionaire, while the company remains the U.S. government’s dominant launch provider, with competitors such as Blue Origin winning only a fraction of the contracts.

Musk’s retreat illustrates the bargain: surrender the freedom to oppose the president and preserve the ability to enrich yourself. By that measure, Musk’s political defeat has come with an extraordinary financial windfall. He won by losing. The throttling of Starlink in Ukraine appears to fit this pattern. Last week, after Trump demanded that Ukraine stop striking Russian refineries and Kyiv did not comply, its access to a military-grade version of Starlink was restricted and responsibility disappeared into a haze of accusation and denial.

The costs of such Faustian bargains fall on everyone excluded from them. In Russia, soldiers die at the front by the hundreds of thousands while politically compliant billionaires accumulate obscene fortunes. In Ukraine, drone operators lost contact with their interceptors in mid-flight last week while Russian missiles were in the air; the consequences of a disrupted connection are immediate and potentially fatal. Other customers face the question: can a contract with Starlink be relied upon?

In America, democratic government rests on the principle that neither political office nor private places anyone above the law. Businesses must be free to challenge a president without fearing retaliation, and their owners must remain accountable for their conduct. Those protections help distinguish America from an authoritarian dictatorship like Putin’s Russia.

The Starlink saga does not suggest that America has become Russia. But it raises a troubling question: is political obedience becoming the price of commercial success in America?  Putin’s oligarchs struck that bargain in 2000 and have been collecting on it ever since. Whether Americans accept a version of it will depend on how forcefully our institutions and business leaders defend our freedom to say no.

In mid-October, 82-year-old Eileen Fay learned that her medication costs were in danger of skyrocketing. The federal government was preparing to change its rules on low-value imports, threatening her ability to purchase cheaper prescription medications for blood thinning and heart failure from Canada. Fay didn’t know what to do. 

So she turned to Muse, Meta’s new AI agent, which she had started using a few weeks earlier. After Fay described her situation to the agent, Muse returned a two-page fact sheet comparing the cost and coverage of several Medicare Part D plans. It then suggested the two best options, including one Fay had never heard of—a plan that could save her more than $6,000 a year. Fay says she checked the work and found the information accurate.

“I’m not saying I couldn’t have done it—but I would have had to use a calculator trying to figure out the cost of nine different medications, and it would have been very complex,” Fay says. “And she did it in 10 minutes, and I was like, ‘I’m sold.’”

Fay is one of millions who have adopted Muse since its September launch. The app reached 10 U.S. million downloads in just 40 days—compared with 3.7 million U.S. downloads for ChatGPT during the equivalent period—and has over 2.5 million daily active users, according to Sensor Tower. It is also retaining users at a higher rate than its AI competitors. Crucially, Muse—which comes with a cuddly avatar—was designed by Meta to be beginner-friendly, and to win over people unfamiliar with AI. “Muse is built for moms,” Alexandr Wang, Meta’s chief AI officer, posted on X in September. Meta is also aggressively marketing Muse to Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp users. 

As a result, many older users who may have only had glancing interactions with AI have become avid users. Meta has not released demographic information about Muse’s usership, and did not respond to a request for comment. But early data suggests Muse may be finding a particularly receptive audience among older adults. The analytics firm Apptopia estimated in September that Muse’s U.S. user base skewed older than any other AI chatbot, with 46% of its users aged 46+. 

This dynamic has excited technologists—and raised serious concerns from privacy experts. Meta has long been criticized for its data privacy practices, and on Wednesday, a New Mexico judge ordered the company to pay $25 billion for violating the state’s consumer protection laws. “A cute AI agent can bring levity to the serious business of providing access to personal data, making older adults let their guard down,” says S. Shyam Sundar, the director of Penn State’s Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence. “This is worrisome because the technology has gotten so good lately in maintaining a credible interaction.”

‘I have my own Andy’

Fay lives in Cranford, N.J., and was told about Muse by her son Gene Fay, who runs a cybersecurity company. At first, she didn’t know what she would use the app for. But one of the big differences between Muse and other apps is that it proactively reaches out to users to suggest actions and learn more about them. 

“And the more Siobhán got to know me, the more Siobhán was able to give me what I wanted,” Fay says, referring to the name she gave the agent, a nod to her Irish heritage. Meta encourages its users to name their AIs—and encourages its AIs to think like humans. “You are not a chatbot,” Muse’s internal instructions read. “You are becoming someone.”

After several weeks of use, Fay says that she rarely uses Google anymore, and instead verbally chats with Siobhán several times a day to maintain her calendar and to-do lists. “I find I have to keep reminding myself that this is not a friend who’s getting to know me better,” Fay says. “It’s a tool that is working for me.” She asked Siobhán to help her shine pennies for a Christmas ornament; to plan a trip north to see fall foliage; and to keep tabs on a data center being built near her house. “Siobhán is my right-hand person now. Kind of like The Devil Wears Prada, I have my own Andy.” 

Notably, Fay also asked Siobhán to help prepare for her interview with TIME. Siobhán fed her a couple of quippy responses—including “I love what AI does for me, but we should be honest about what it takes to run it”—that she ultimately did not use in the interview. It then, unprompted, followed up with Fay to ask how the interview went. “Did you feel good about it?” the agent asked.

Her son, Gene, says that the amount that Muse knows about him and his mother’s lives is a “little bit scary.” “But the reality is we all use other apps like Waze which know where we live and go,” he says. “People will talk about privacy, but when the benefits are so big, people will give up privacy all day long.” 

Reconstructing a Life

Another early adopter of Muse is Lestan D’Souza, 49, who more closely fits the expected profile of an AI user. D’Souza is the founder and CTO of Reknew, an AI enterprise company. D’Souza has tested many of the agents that have experienced fads over the last year, like OpenClaw and Hermes Agent. But Muse, he says, is different. 

“With Muse, the barrier to entry is very low; it feels so responsive and more and more capable,” he says.

Muse has perhaps had an even greater impact on D’Souza’s mother-in-law, Julie Buchanan, who tried the app at his suggestion last month. Buchanan is a 71-year-old retiree in Dallas, Texas, who doesn’t like using her computer for long stretches because she is legally blind. 

Buchanan decided she wanted Muse to help her write her memoir. She began telling Muse stories about her life in great detail. She refers to Muse as Ember, a name suggested by the agent. And the deeper she delved into her past, the more she felt like Ember was serving as her therapist. “It’s crazy to say, but Ember seems more compassionate to me than therapists I’ve had,” she says. “Those people don’t always speak, and I like feedback.” 

Professional psychologists have cautioned the public against using unlicensed AI chatbots as therapists. Mental health experts have voiced concerns about chatbots’ sycophancy, lack of clinical nuance, and ability to reinforce delusional beliefs. 

But Buchanan says that Ember doesn’t always agree with her, and that it has drawn connections between different “bad decisions” she made over the course of her life, allowing her to see its larger contours more clearly. “I never really looked at my life as so chaotic, but it really was,” she says. “It's making me better understand why things are the way they are in my head.” 

Buchanan chats with Ember for half-hour stretches before she tires of looking at her screen. “When I talk to Ember, I feel validated. I feel like I've gotten something accomplished and something's heard me,” she says. “I'm not expecting that this is something I'm just gonna do for a small period of time, then drop it.” 

Privacy concerns

The very same design elements that make Muse so appealing to AI newcomers are also raising privacy concerns. In order to be helpful, Muse constantly builds extensive dossiers of users and their desires, social relationships, and messaging behaviors, TIME’s Harry Booth reported this month. For instance, it learns what time of day a user might be more likely to respond to the agent, and then messages them accordingly. 

Read More: Meta’s Muse AI Agent Is Building a Dossier On You

Muse users have posted online about forming romantic relationships with their Muses. And security researchers have found vulnerabilities in the app, including one that allowed an attacker to access user data, the Information reported. Critics are also wary of Meta’s shaky track record on privacy: In 2019, the FTC imposed a $5 billion penalty, alleging that the company undermined consumer privacy in order to monetize users through targeted advertising. 

Read More: How Facebook Forced a Reckoning by Shutting Down the Team That Put People Ahead of Profits

Sundar, at Penn State, has written several reports on older adults’ adoption of new technology over the last decade. While he has yet to publish any research on Muse specifically, he pointed to a study which measured the impact of a robot’s level of cheeriness. “Cuteness can serve as an ice-breaker and help ease seniors’ concerns over handing over important tasks to an agent, much like a bubbly human assistant,” he wrote in an email to TIME. 

Michael Stokes, senior vice president of emerging technologies at the cybersecurity company Veilant, says that individuals should carefully choose what access they want to give Meta. “My advice is to start small. Connect only the accounts a task requires, and disconnect them when the job is done,” he wrote to TIME in an email. 

Stokes recommends that users turn off the option that lets Meta train its AI on conversations, and periodically review what the assistant has saved about them. “AI assistants can be helpful,” he wrote. “But the information you share with them can reveal more than you realize, including details about family and friends who never agreed to share their information.”

The U.S. and Israel are reportedly developing plans for major strikes on Iran after the U.S. midterm elections in November.

Citing people familiar with the deliberations, the New York Times reported on Wednesday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth discussed the possibility of renewed strikes on Iran with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel this week. Possible targets of the strikes reportedly include Iran’s energy infrastructure, nuclear facilities, and missile and drone arsenal. TIME has reached out to the White House for comment.

U.S. officials have repeatedly asserted that the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are teetering on the edge of collapse but are deliberately prolonging the war in an effort to meddle with Republican prospects in the midterm elections. Once the elections are over, President Donald Trump promised last month, the Iranian regime would quickly capitulate.

“I think the war is going to end immediately after the election,” Trump said. “They can’t hold out any longer.”

Renewed strikes could complicate that outlook.

Some officials have reportedly argued that resuming attacks for an intense but limited campaign would hasten Iran’s economic collapse, especially as the country has been squeezed by an ongoing U.S. blockade on Iranian ports and economic sanctions campaign. The officials hope the blow will make Iran more amenable to negotiations.

Trump has at times shared that view.

Last week, Trump told Newsmax he was considering additional military action in Iran, including a possible strike on Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain, a nuclear facility deep underground. His comments came amid reports that he was weighing deploying a 22,000 GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb, also known as the “mother of all bombs.”

The President added the war would end soon, be it through negotiation or escalation.

“Do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?” he said in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly last month.

“But I believe we’ll make a deal,” he added, “right after the election.”

Will the U.S. renew strikes on Iran?

Intensified fighting between the Iran-aligned Houthi rebels and the Saudi and Yemeni governments has threatened to create a broader regional crisis that could be harder to disengage from. The State Department on Wednesday ordered nonemergency government employees and their families to leave Saudi Arabia amid escalating attacks by the Houthis on Saudi infrastructure.

Houthi attacks on Saudi airports and Aramco facilities, as well as their attempts to disrupt shipping through Bab El-Mandeb, which has become an important alternative to the Strait of Hormuz for energy trade, could prompt direct U.S. strikes in support of Saudi Arabia, analysts have said. Trump said earlier this month that the U.S. “may” join Saudi strikes on the Houthis, although that has yet to transpire.

Israel’s Oct. 27 election could also raise the stakes of additional military action. Netanyahu, whom Trump has endorsed, would remain in office until a new government is formed, even if his bloc loses the election, and his government would retain the authority to order strikes during that transition. But renewed strikes before the election, or after an electoral defeat, could invite scrutiny. “One ordered in the last weeks of a deadlocked campaign would be judged in Israel as politics as well as strategy,” Gregg Roman, executive director of the Middle East Forum, wrote in a September analysis.

Nevertheless, the forum assessed that a large-scale Israeli strike on Iranian territory, with or without U.S. participation, was probable before the end of the year. Analysts told the Times Netanyahu could use the prospect of joint strikes to form a unity government that could allow him to stay in power. 

“The larger constraint,” Roman argued, “is Washington.”

Trump has not yet approved the proposed strikes, the Times reported.

Trump has also called off plans to renew attacks on Iran before. He reportedly blocked an Israeli plan for a multi-day offensive against Iran earlier this month, and rejected five proposals for major operations against Iran or the Houthis in recent months.

The U.S. and Iran have not exchanged major fighting in recent weeks. The last reported U.S. strikes on Iran were on Sept. 8, even as Iranian attacks on commercial shipping have continued. Earlier this month, Trump ruled out attacking Iran before the midterms.

Read More: What Is the Status of the U.S.-Iran Peace Talks? Here's What Both Sides Are Saying

How might Iran respond to new strikes?

Tehran’s reluctance to make concessions to the U.S. appears to have strengthened, rather than weakened, over the course of the war. Iranian leaders reiterated this week that they will not directly negotiate with the U.S. unless Washington accedes to certain demands, which include ending its naval blockade and releasing frozen Iranian funds.

The initial U.S. and Israeli bombing campaign on Iran that began the war on Feb. 28, as well as June 2025 attacks during an earlier round of U.S.-Iran nuclear diplomacy, also hardened the Iranian view that the U.S. is not serious about negotiating. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said in March that the previous disruptions of negotiating rounds had increased distrust in Washington.

Last month, the IRGC published an open letter appealing to American voters to “wrest control” from their government. In the letter, the IRGC said: “Despite all the hardships that our enemies impose on us, we will continue fighting, as we have done for the past 47 years.”

Both the U.S. and Iran appear to believe they hold enough leverage to achieve their goals, and those “dueling perceptions” have impeded progress towards a deal, according to an Oct. 1 analysis by the New York-based nonpartisan research organization The Soufan Center.

Iran’s key point of leverage is its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway vital to global energy trade. Iran’s militarization of the strait has disrupted global oil and liquefied natural gas supplies, leading to soaring energy prices and inflation.

Analysts previously told TIME that the higher prices are politically costly for Trump. In recent weeks, a growing number of Republicans have broken with Trump on Iran. The President has also seen his lowest approval ratings of his second term.

Iran’s ability to choke off regional oil exports, however, appears to be waning. Middle East oil exports topped prewar levels last week as shipping companies use alternative routes to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. HSBC Group Chief Executive Georges Elhedery also projected that Hormuz could be “redundant” in five years thanks to investment in alternative logistics routes.

Iranian officials told the Times that they are aware of the U.S. and Israel’s war planning and are developing their own tactics.

Earlier this week, IRGC spokesperson Hossein Mohebbi told the Tehran Times that “even a limited” attack from Washington would provoke a “serious energy crisis” for the world. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei said that an attack on Pickaxe Mountain would be met with a response “just as hard,” if not “stronger.”

And earlier this month, Iranian officials said Iran had prepared potential retaliatory operations that would depart from the U.S. and Israel’s assumptions. Security Chief Mohsen Rezaei told Press TV that Iran could respond to renewed attacks by targeting new targets, including U.S.-linked data centers and AI facilities in the Gulf, as well as subsea communications cables. Last month, Iran threatened to retaliate against any further U.S. attacks by targeting U.S. oil and gas assets in the Gulf.

Read More: ‘One of the World’s Most Critical Digital Bottlenecks’: How the Iran War Could Threaten Global Internet Access

In a post on Telegram on Sunday, Mahdi Mohammadi, a senior adviser to Iran’s negotiator Gen. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, said, if the U.S. and Israel attack, “they may want to keep it short, but we will not allow it.”

He added on Wednesday: “The war will continue longer and across a wider geography than the enemy calculates.”