Tesla (TSLA) CEO and billionaire Elon Musk has been in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin since 2022, according to an exclusive report by the Wall Street Journal. Warren Strobel, Wall Street Journal national security reporter and co-author of this breaking article, joins Morning Brief to break down the news and what it could mean for United States-Russia relations. Global officials told the Journal that Musk has been in contact with Putin and other Kremlin officials "right up until this spring and summer," Strobel explains to Yahoo Finance. "Wide-ranging talks about business, about personal stuff, and of course, about Ukraine. And we had two sources who told us that Putin actually asked Musk not to turn on Starlink over Taiwan as a favor to the Chinese President Xi Jinping. And of course, Putin is in some debt to Xi Jinping for his help and support on Ukraine." He notes that there is no suspicion of Musk leaking classified information or secrets to Russia. Rather, the concern lies in the fact that "there’s an unauthorized channel here at the very highest levels of the Kremlin, and that Musk may either voluntarily or involuntarily sort of provide a channel for Putin to get his propaganda out and to get his view of Ukraine out." Strobel explains that there is heightened concern about Musk’s relationship with Russia given that he has recently joined former President Donald Trump on the campaign trail. On the other hand, however, he believes it also opens up a channel that could be used between the US and Russia in terms of diplomacy. A recent Yahoo Finance survey asked over 4,000 regular users to gauge whether Musk’s campaigning could actually be hurting Trump’s re-election efforts. Strobel notes there to be very few communication inroads between the US and Russian, "which is kind of dangerous situation for the world’s two leading nuclear powers. So if Trump is reelected, he has another means to communicate with the Russian leader. So kind of a double-edged sword."
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