The past several weeks might have been tumultuous or even existential for a lot of U.S. businesses caught up in trade wars, but they’ve been pretty darn good for Starlink, the satellite company owned by Elon Musk.

After years of regulatory holdups, Starlink reached distribution deals in March with two giant internet providers in India, the world’s most populous country, and won approval in neighboring Pakistan as well. Another of America’s major trade partners, Vietnam,  waived a rule that required Starlink to partner with a domestic company and said it would launch a five-year pilot program with Starlink.

Bangladesh, the second-largest exporter of garments to the U.S., just announced its own deal with Starlink after months of stalled negotiations. And in Lesotho, officials brushed aside long-standing objections to Starlink’s foreign ownership and granted the company a license.

I can find no publicly available data that lets us reliably compare the pace of Starlink’s dealmaking in the first part of this year to previous years. But all of these countries represent long-sought partnerships for Musk, and all of them but Lesotho will rank among Starlink’s top markets in terms of population.

This flurry of expansion, of course, comes as most of the world views Musk as the second most powerful man in D.C. So it raises some obvious questions.

I’ve spent the past month trying to untangle the complicated case of Bangladesh because it goes directly to the intersection of Musk’s unprecedented role in the Trump administration, his personal interests and American trade policy.

A country that somehow packs half the population of the United States into a land mass roughly the size of Alabama (think about that for a minute), Bangladesh finds itself in a particularly delicate position. Last year, a student-led uprising led to the ouster of the country’s authoritarian leader, Sheikh Hasina, and the establishment of an interim government led by Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel laureate. Yunus has attracted intellectuals and former dissidents to his government as he tries to build the country’s first functioning democracy, while facing stiff resistance from his much larger neighbor, India, where Hasina has taken sanctuary.

It’s the kind of democratic revolution America has often embraced — especially since Yunus is a past recipient of both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. But the Trump administration’s stance toward Bangladesh has hovered somewhere between indifferent and hostile. Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has echoed dubious allegations from India that the new government persecutes Hindus and harbors Islamist terrorists.

This is a major concern for the Bangladeshis, who rely heavily on exporting T-shirts and the like to America. So, in February, shortly after Trump took office, Yunus dispatched a special envoy, Khalilur Rahman, to Washington in hopes of building bridges on trade and security issues.

According to a source familiar with the Bangladeshi government, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, Rahman visited the White House complex in mid-February and met with an official from the trade representative’s office, who pressed him on the issue of cotton imports. Bangladesh, the world’s largest cotton importer, gets most of its supply from West Africa and Brazil, and the United States was insisting it buy more American cotton if it wanted to head off tariffs.

According to the account from the source, Rahman readily agreed to this demand if it would lead to a new trade deal — but his visit wasn’t quite finished. Rahman was then led to an office where he was surprised to find the world’s richest man.

Musk wanted to discuss ongoing negotiations between Starlink and Bangladeshi regulators, who were under pressure from local telecom companies to keep Starlink out. I was told Rahman called Yunus from that meeting and relayed Musk’s concerns. The apparent implication, though it wasn’t stated outright, was that one of the world’s largest textile exporters would not be able to get favorable trade terms from the United States if Starlink wasn’t allowed entry into the Bangladeshi market.

When I asked the Bangladeshi government, through its embassy in D.C., whether any of its officials had met with Musk in Washington or if the country felt pressured to approve a license for Starlink, I got the same one-sentence reply to both: “The answer is no.” Privately, government officials maintain that Yunus’s government has long wanted to bring Starlink into the country (mainly because the previous regime had shut down the locally controlled internet in an effort to thwart the student revolution), so there would have been no need for Musk to lean on them.

There’s no doubt Bangladesh did want a deal with Starlink. It’s also true that officials there don’t want to disclose anything that would risk souring relations with Musk because the last thing they want right now is to antagonize the Trump administration. It’s hard to blame them for that.

We know a few other things for sure, too. Around the same time Rahman was in Washington, newspapers in Bangladesh reported that Yunus and Rahman met by videoconference for 90 minutes with Musk and Richard Griffiths, one of his lieutenants at Starlink, and that Yunus invited Musk to come to Bangladesh to witness the launch of the Starlink system. On X, Yunus posted that he had a “great meeting” with Musk and looked forward to working with him.

We also know that Bangladesh was not the only country trying to avoid tariffs that talked with Musk about Starlink. The same week that Rahman was in Washington, Musk met with India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, at Blair House, across the street from the White House. According to  India Today, which published a picture of Musk and three of his children sitting with Modi, a central agenda item was Starlink’s pending approval in India.

I realize it feels hopelessly naive to dwell on ethics laws in Washington these days (you might as well reminisce about all the spittoons that once dotted offices on Capitol Hill), but in case you were wondering: federal law generally makes it illegal for an official of the executive branch to take part “personally and substantially in an official capacity” in any discussion where he or she has a personal financial interest. A meeting between Musk and foreign leaders about Starlink from the White House would appear problematic.

When I told Sen. Mark R. Warner (Virginia), the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, about Starlink’s recent flurry of agreements and Musk’s purported discussions with foreign leaders on government grounds, he was taken aback.

“I think that crosses virtually every ethical and legal standard that has at least been the traditional way our country operates,” Warner said. “Musk has created some great companies, but they should not have such an unfair advantage that they get forced on countries by their founder sitting in government spaces.”

Even if Musk isn’t making an explicit connection in these meetings between Starlink approvals and his influence on the president, the perception that there is one has taken hold among anxious officials in other countries. As I was reporting this column, the story about Bangladesh was making its way around political and business circles in South Africa, which is seeking its own crucial trade deal with the Trump administration.

Like Vietnam, South Africa has a law against foreign communications companies operating without local partners — in this case, specifically a Black-owned partner, as the country continues to shed the vestiges of the apartheid era. Musk, a South African native, has repeatedly denounced that law as racist; in March, he posted on X that “Starlink is not allowed to operate in South Africa, because I’m not black.”

Two South African insiders told me that that they now assumed that approval of a license for Starlink was a prerequisite for getting a favorable trade deal. As if to underscore that point, a leading legislator just introduced a controversial measure to exempt Starlink from the partnership law.

(The White House, which fields questions related to Musk’s work at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, declined to answer questions about Starlink’s role in trade negotiations or Musk’s meetings with Rahman and Modi. It has previously said that Musk abides “by all applicable federal laws.” An email I sent to Starlink’s media department went unanswered, as well.)

The idea that some of America’s worried trade partners think they’re trading Starlink licenses for merciful policy is disturbing enough. What makes it even worse, perhaps, is that they could get suckered in the process.

Consider, again, the case of Bangladesh. After resolving its impasse with Musk and stepping up its efforts to import American cotton, Bangladeshi officials were stunned to turn on the television in early April and see their country listed on Trump’s giant whiteboard of targeted trade partners — next to a draconian tariff rate of 37 percent. All their efforts to placate Musk and Trump, just a few weeks earlier, had essentially won them nothing (although Trump has since paused the implementation of most tariffs).

You could argue that this proves there isn’t any link, after all, between trade negotiations and Musk’s business dealings. But it seems the Bangladeshis were under a different impression. Days later, after Trump laid out his proposed tariffs, Yunus sent a letter to the president, recounting the many ways in which Bangladesh was cooperating with American trade demands — such as the construction of a “bonded warehousing facility” to increase cotton imports — and pleading with the president to postpone the tariffs for three months. Among the concessions to which he pointed: the country’s pending approval of Starlink.

As I talked about this with dozens of insiders in Washington and abroad over the past few months, what struck me most was the lack of evident outrage. I mean, this is a city that once found itself, in the Clinton years, paralyzed for weeks over possible conflicts of interest in the White House travel office. But in just the first three months since Trump returned to town and installed Musk as a kind of prime minister for efficiency, everyone seems to have resigned themselves to a new kind of ethical normal.

The conflicts between Musk’s government work and his private businesses are too myriad to track. Not only do licenses for Starlink appear to have worked their way into trade negotiations, but the service has now been installed across the federal government — including at the White House campus — and may soon be included in a federal grant program to low-income areas. Trump’s new NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman, is a friend of Musk’s who commanded the first-ever civilian spaceflight by SpaceX, Musk’s rocket company; he is now in charge of designing the missions for which SpaceX will be bidding. (At his confirmation hearing, Isaacman repeatedly assured senators that he would not be influenced by his relationship to Musk.)

The Wall Street Journal reported in February that a lawyer at X had pressured the large advertising firm Interpublic to direct more ads toward the social media platform — a move interpreted by the firm as a warning that its proposed merger with Omnicom could face government scrutiny if it didn’t. (X declined comment at the time.) According to Wired, the Social Security Administration is now moving its entire communications operation to X. And Trump himself held what amounted to a public sales pitch for Tesla on the White House grounds.

The most common take you hear on all this — at least among non-Trump supporters — is that Musk is all about enriching himself, which is why he’s ignoring ethical conflicts and bending the government to his will. This seems simplistic to me. Musk is worth more than $300 billion; it strains credulity to think that he’s executed a plan to take over Washington just so he can land a few more contracts. This is like saying Napoleon invaded Italy because he wanted more wine.

No, I’m inclined to believe Musk can’t actually conceive of the conflicts here because he fundamentally believes that his businesses are forces for good. This is the central theme of his career: that he is single-handedly saving the planet and leading humankind to colonize Mars. The getting-rich part is just what happens when you’re a visionary. A corollary to that theme is that Musk disdains any rule or regulation that would stand in the way of his saving humanity, which is why he generally loathes government.

So in Musk’s mind, there would be no conflict in using his power to proselytize for his technologies to the rest of the world. The world will be better off for it. Great men of action do not suffer ethical watchdogs in badly tailored suits.

In some respects, he may be right — hard as that is to admit. You can jump up and down about Trump hyping Teslas on the White House lawn, but aren’t we supposed to want the proliferation of cleaner cars? If Musk’s rockets can make the quest for Mars faster and cheaper, wouldn’t any competent government accept his help? If Starlink can bring reliable internet to countries where repressive governments have had the ability to shut off the internet, isn’t that a good thing?

The truth is that if Musk were merely an influential outsider who happened to own some of the most innovative companies in America, his getting richer off government contracts wouldn’t be hard to justify. In fact, it would be the government’s job to champion his cause, as it always does for American industries when they create jobs.

What Musk can’t seem to grasp is that he isn’t just an influential outsider; he is, instead, the most powerful government official with no apparent accountability that the country has ever seen (or at least he will be for another month or so, after which he has said he will step back).Practically everything he does after getting up in the morning and brushing his teeth raises an ethical dilemma.

For instance, Musk has emerged over these past few weeks as the most vocal critic of the tariff policy inside the administration, going as far as to attack Peter Navarro, Trump’s principal trade adviser. Musk has long been a free trader.

But given his spate of new Starlink deals, how do we know he isn’t engaged in lobbying against the tariffs on behalf of other governments, in exchange for those governments removing obstacles to his business? We don’t, which is exactly why ethics laws exist in the first place.

The damage from Musk’s arrogance isn’t simply that he is spinning a web of impenetrable conflicts. It’s that he is doing more than anyone — except perhaps Trump himself — to obliterate the concept of “American exceptionalism,” the idea that the United States conducts itself by a different code than other world powers, past and present.

This, after all, is the thing that shocks officials in Bangladesh and South Africa and other countries who feel caught in Musk’s grip — not that a billionaire businessman would have influence over trade policy but that he could brazenly discuss his company’s licenses from the White House complex in the middle of trade negotiations.

Things have long been done this way in most developing countries, but never in Washington, where our lofty ideals about the rule of law are what supposedly set us apart. Other governments used to grumble that America always behaved as if it were better and more righteous than the rest of the world. Under the Trump-Musk regime, they are coming to understand that we no longer give a damn.