Elon Musk secretly ordered SpaceX engineers to switch off the Starlink satellite communications network near the coast of occupied Crimea in order to thwart a Ukrainian surprise attack on Russia’s naval fleet, according to a report. The incident last year is reported in Walter Isaacson’s upcoming biography of the billionaire titled Elon Musk. With the comms down, the Ukrainian submarine drones packed with explosives “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,” Isaacson writes, according to CNN. Musk was reportedly motivated to foil the attack out of concern that a strike on Crimea would constitute a “mini-Pearl Harbor” and lead to Russia retaliating with nuclear weapons. The SpaceX boss apparently began to question his decision to support Starlink being used for Kyiv’s military communications when Ukraine started to use the tech in offensive operations against Russia. “How am I in this war?” Musk asked Isaacson. “Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars. It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good peaceful things, not drone strikes.”
The internet service provider being used by the Ukrainian military not only knew about specific battle plans but they relayed that information to their CEO? (No wait. The article claims that military officials actually called him up and gave him the details personally. This included schematics of the submarine drones which were "impressive." Good freaking lord.)
The CEO then benevolently pulled the plug while having an emotional and heroic moment of introspection regarding the tools of war??
Both of those things sound very made up to me. The first sounds fabricated as a Macguffin to lead into #2. That's where where all the self-aggrandizing and emotional shit happens.
But if anyone thinks the first thing is plausible, I'd be interested in hearing more opinions.
I honestly don't care about the second item, but if the military is relaying plans to this known fuckwit, they probably got what they had coming.
“How did I end up in the war” huh? I thought this guy was supposed to be smart, but he doesn’t get how we innovate in war with whatever best tools are available to us?
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