Elon Musk Saying 'All Cars' Will Have Starlink As The 'Only Way' To Connect Them Sounds More Like Threat Than Promise

Imagine a society in which the world's richest man owns the one and only data service connecting every car on the road. Sounds like it couldn't possibly have negative implications or side effects whatsoever. No dystopian future to see here. But you may not have to imagine it if Elon Musk gets his way. In a tweet, he says it's pretty much inevitable:

All cars will have Starlink in the future.

It's the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.

Let's come back to Earth for a moment to see where this is coming from. On July 20, Tesla confirmed that the autonomous taxi that looks like poop from a butt would include a Starlink dish built into its roof, according to Teslarati. Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla's head of AI, clarified that the Cybercab still handles its self-driving tasks internally, and the data connection was there for navigation, customer service, and fleet management. Musk added that customers could also use it to watch 4K streaming video during their trips.

By July 22, Musk said that Starlink would come not only with the Cybercab, but all of Tesla's models. In fact, he feels that every car on the road will eventually need a high-bandwidth internet connection to support their AI computing demands, something I'm sure we're all looking forward to. Fast forward to August 8, when Chris Deardurff posted a picture to X showing a Starlink-equipped Cybercab on the road in Dallas, Texas. Sawyer Merritt shared it, and Musk replied the following day with his comment about how Starlink is The One True Way for all cars. The day after that, Tesla posted official pictures of a Cybercab with an integrated Starlink dish.

PC Magazine suspects that Musk's comments about Starlink in every car might have been referring to Starlink Mobile, which will connect directly to existing cellular devices without the need for a satellite dish. But it's no coincidence that the man making these comments happens to own a car company, satellite internet company, and AI companies, all of which are becoming increasingly intertwined. If AI explodes as Musk predicts, computing could be offloaded to data centers while our devices, including cars, become more like data terminals than processors. A fast, reliable, omnipresent data connection would be required. Starlink could provide that, along with data centers in space to do all our computing for us.

What a horrifying thought. He's already wrecked his way through the government with DOGE, collecting who knows how much of our personal information along the way. Now he's talking about setting up a system where his network and his data centers do all of our computing for us. What privacy would be left at that point? It may be time to go off-grid, dig out our Commodore 64s, and print zines on dot matrix printers.

Fortunately, many of Musk's ideas never become reality. Tesla's "Full Self-Driving" system isn't really full self-driving. Fleets of Starships keep exploding instead of taking us back to the moon as promised. Even SpaceX doesn't believe its own hype. And don't even get us started on the Tesla Roadster, which will absolutely positively come out this year. Let's hope our computing power stays down to Earth and local, not owned and operated by one man who is perfectly fair, treats everyone well, and is not at all unhinged.