Five hundred and fifty kilometres above the Earth, satellites speed across the sky, beaming internet to more than 120,000 Australians. Across the globe, the same network helps Ukrainian soldiers get online in areas where Russia has knocked out infrastructure on the ground.

The extent to which the surprisingly sleek units from Elon Musk’s Starlink are undermining the National Broadband Network, and exciting the country’s largest phone companies, shows how the influence of the world’s richest man is growing in Australia.