US–India Trade Talks and Musk's Space-AI Gamble

The fact that Russian oil sells at a discount of around $15 per barrel compared to other sources creates significant demand for Russian crude by countries like India. To this end, even if India were to purchase less Russian oil, Russia would likely find purchasers willing to buy its oil; there would likely always be a market for the oil, no matter how much you try to eliminate the Russian oil supply from the world market. This would also likely increase the price of oil globally as a result of a sudden decrease in supply and, therefore, could also result in a global inflationary crisis.

There is also significant disagreement between the US and EU approaches to the same problem. The US is more actively using its global power to obtain economic gains which are tied to specific geopolitical objectives. The EU has recently signed an extensive trade agreement with India after extensively negotiating with it for almost two decades. The result of this agreement by the EU did not tie in cooperation and trade with a reduction in purchases of Russian oil.

Using a strategy of balancing its relations with the major world powers, India has historically kept itself from completely aligning with either of the two major blocs. This allows them to protect their economic interests while maintaining political flexibility with respect to their foreign policy.

The same new technology developing around trade and energy policy between nations can also be seen with the recent announcement by Elon Musk to merge his satellite/aeronautics company, SpaceX, with his artificial intelligence company, xAI, giving the combined companies a value of around $1.25 trillion. Musk has stated that there is not enough energy to sustain the rapid growth of AI on Earth, and being able to place the necessary computing/data infrastructure into space, where solar energy is freely available, would solve the problem.

The intent of this merger (and Musk's plan) is to take the satellite-launching capabilities of SpaceX and tie them to the satellite data collection and processing of xAI. However, based on the current revenue levels of SpaceX, which are approximately $60 billion annually, there is no way that SpaceX could justify the valuation represented by the merger. Furthermore, Musk has stated that he would deploy approximately one million satellites globally; this is beyond current capacity and is still theoretical at this time.