CNN Exclusive: ‘How am I in this war?’: New Musk biography offers fresh details about the billionaire’s Ukraine dilemma
CNN Exclusive: ‘How am I in this war?’: New Musk biography offers fresh details about the billionaire’s Ukraine dilemma
Elon Musk secretly ordered his engineers to turn off his company’s Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last year to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet, according to an excerpt adapted from Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the eccentric billiona...
As Ukrainian submarine drones strapped with explosives approached the Russian fleet, they “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,” Isaacson writes.
This sounds like treason to me. This needs to be investigated, we can't have a private citizen fucking the Ukrainians like this.
EDIT: Musk admits to it: https://sh.itjust.works/post/4649482
Think maybe it was a bad idea to create a system that allows billionaires to unaccountably make policy decisions on issues that have nothing to do with them
I'm not a lawyer, but this has to have been illegal somehow, right?
This is insanity... Is there even any precedence for a private citizen from an uninvolved (not directly, anyway) nation interfering in a war? I'm really not sure that it's even been possible before... At least, not tothis degree...
If nothing else, I wonder if this admission could open him up to civil lawsuits from Ukraine itself - or individual Ukrainian citizens, if nothing else - as it appears his actions could be shown to be directly responsible for their death/injury?
In law circles this is known as "a dick move".
“The Pentagon had a $145 million check ready to hand to me, literally,” Isaacson quotes Shotwell as saying. “Then Elon succumbed to the bullshit on Twitter and to the haters at the Pentagon who leaked the story.”
Amazing quote. His shitposting habit is costing him millions left and right.
Shotwell is the main reason why SpaceX has been as successful as they have. Elon had the purse but she has the brains and has up until now been able to keep him reigned in.
I think you can only perform treason to your own country.
I'm still certain Elon has fucked over some sort of international law, I just don't know which one.
But the truly galaxy brain move is this:
After CNN’s reporting, Musk reversed course, tweeting “the hell with it … we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free.”
Gwynne Shotwell, Musk’s president at SpaceX, was livid at Musk’s reversal, according to Isaacson.
“The Pentagon had a $145 million check ready to hand to me, literally,” Isaacson quotes Shotwell as saying. “Then Elon succumbed to the bullshit on Twitter and to the haters at the Pentagon who leaked the story.”
The best part is this move further cements how unstable Musk is, and probably makes the pentagon realize he has the ability to fuck with military applications
He very well could have caused the government to start discussing plans to nationalize Starlink
I've been seeing this a lot, but do they have a particular reason they would be able to nationalize starlink? Was there some sort of contract or investment that gives them stakes in it?
It'd be an extreme action. But during wartime, USA has the right to nationalize our companies in the name of defense.
I'm not particularly keen on the details, you'd probably have to ask a lawyer over these details. But USA nationalized companies like GM during the 2008 crisis, for an example. So we don't actually have to go back too far into history to see this kind of extreme action being taken. Single decades, not even multiple decades.
I dunno if nationalizing Starlink makes the best sense... yet. At a minimum, this has proven that Starlink is an unreliable partner as a wartime satellite internet provider however. Ideally, we can just rebuild our investments in other companies / alternative satellites and avoid SpaceX as a peg in our defense plan.
Is this the billionaire supervillain version of walking into a room, and just standing in the middle of it thinking "...why did I come in here?"
Dude is literally getting DoD and NASA contracts and getting a Top Secret clearance + Pentagon money, and suddenly finds himself in an antiwar stance after just a few minutes of personally talking with Putin.
I thank the Ukrainians for taking this one for the team. At least we learned that Musk is not to be trusted in a wartime environment. Sucks for the Ukrainians who need a reliable internet provider though, but I'm sure the Pentagon is thinking of a solution to this problem now.