Elon Musk’s Real Empire Isn’t SpaceX. It’s Starlink

Misha Glenny on war zones, McMafia, and why this is the time of monsters.

In 1994, Misha Glenny drove across Sarajevo Airport under sniper fire. A bullet entered his car, passed through the drive shaft, and exited the other side. He didn't panic. He traced the bullet's path with the detached curiosity of someone who had been doing this for years.

Glenny made his name covering the fall of communism and the Yugoslav Wars for the Guardian and the BBC, then spent years tracing the globalisation of organised crime for McMafia. He has just taken over In Our Time from Melvyn Bragg. In this conversation he covers the three moments when new technology met political revolution and ended in catastrophic violence, why Starlink is Musk's real business, how the Austrian army decoupled from Microsoft, and why organized crime adapted to Ukraine faster than any government.

The Sarajevo opening is the best this show has had. The McMafia section on what criminals understand that governments don't is the most practically useful. The In Our Time section at the end, on being the representative of the listener rather than a demonstration of your own cleverness, is the one that stays with you longest.