Elon Musk’s Starlink Lands $100K Seattle Police Contract

Seattle advocates are calling on the Seattle Police Department (SPD) to end their new contract with right-wing billionaire Elon Musk’s company Starlink. SPD confirmed in an email to The Burner that they paid more than $100,000 in grant funding for 5 months of Starlink Satellite internet service to, according to SPD, support the department’s internet needs during the upcoming FIFA World Cup. 

SPD would not say whether it plans to continue using Starlink after the World Cup or seek future taxpayer funding for the service. But in a city where you can find a crowd of people protesting outside of a Tesla showroom most weekends, any ties to Musk — for any amount of time, no matter how small relative to his wealth, grant funded or otherwise — will be met with outrage from advocates. 

“Elon Musk has done enormous damage to our country, using his vast fortune to spread bigotry and lies on his social network and is still funding MAGA politicians with tens of millions of dollars,” a spokesperson for local advocacy group Defund Musk wrote in a statement to The Burner. “Musk's work with DOGE is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world as a result of the callous, misinformed, and racist dismantling of USAID.”

“The Seattle Police department claims to be committed to anti-racism but a partnership with Starlink and Elon Musk is a betrayal of those principles. Defund Musk calls on SPD to end any association with the company,” Defund Musk’s spokesperson said. 

The Mayor and the SeattleFWC26, the World Cup’s local organizing committee, did not respond to requests for comment. 

Starlink is a satellite internet service that sells broadband connectivity using a

constellation of low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellites operated by Musk’s SpaceX, Starlink’s parent company. The company aimed to corner the market for broadband in rural areas, but increasingly, government entities have contracted with Starlink for infrastructure in high-density areas in major cities. 

SPD confirmed the department is contracting with Starlink in an email to The Burner earlier this month. The spokesperson emphasized the “good news” that SPD paid Starlink with FIFA grant money and “not a single dollar from the Seattle budget.” 

SPD explained they contracted with Starlink “for back up use on the mobile precincts, command posts, and ICAC units that will be set up near the stadium and fan zones throughout the city. The only need for these is if our traditional cell networks go down.”

The department sent screenshots from their ordering system that showed three transactions. The earliest occurred March 18 when SPD paid Starlink almost $70,000 in grant money for “radio communications installation in mobile precinct vans.” Then between two transactions on April 2 and 29, the department paid Starlink more than $40,000 in grant funding for “Starlink performance (Gen 3 kit) and 5 months of Local Priority 2 TB/month Satellite internet.” 

SPD did not respond when asked about the timeline of their usage — when they will boot up Starlink, if they already have, and when they will stop. Regardless, according to their own book keeping, SPD has paid for Starlink services lasting more than five times the length of Seattle’s World Cup festivities, which span June 15 to July 6.

Police watchdogs have noted that SPD has tried out new toys with one-time funding that ended up sticking around. For example, the real-time crime center, once just a pilot program, was initially paid for by one-time salary savings. Before the City could properly assess the efficacy of the program, the previous Mayor and the City Council prematurely expanded and poured more money into the program. 

However, advocates could not immediately find an example of SPD seeking ongoing funding to continue something initially paid for by a one-time grant. Still, police accountability advocates and the anti-Musk crew plan to monitor whether SPD seeks ongoing funding for the service after the World Cup.