Elon Musk ordered Starlink communications system to be turned off during Ukraine attack, book says [AUTHOR NOW CLAIMS THIS IS WRONG, please see the text in the body below]
edition.cnn.com
Elon Musk biographer admits suggestion SpaceX head blocked Ukraine drone attack was wrong:
The title states 'book says' making it sound like it's hearsay, but he admitted today that it was true:
https://sh.itjust.works/post/4649482
What an absolute piece of shit, he's not even ashamed of being a Russian agent.
The book is a Musk biography by the author Walter Isaacson. Musk admitted his action to tbe author as the article says. (But, yeah, maybe if someone doesn't read the entire article it could be misleading.)
The book says he ordered starlink turned off to stop the attack.
He only admitted it was always off, and refused to turn it on.
What the book says is only alleged, there's no admission.
Edit: neither take is good, but one is vastly different from the other.
He really is just an absolute garbage human being
The US military should just take it over. Twitter (x) hiding reports in search results, then Starlink that is turned off all the time. Elon just plays to the highest bidder, and has no morals.
Yeah, a large satellite constellation feels like something a private citizen shouldnt own
Or at the very least should lose control of if misused.
Honestly what needs to happen. He's a coward and cost who knows how many lives giving Russia what it wants.
The US military already has its own private Starlink constellation called Starshield.
That just sounds like a great way to have the US Government in charge of when the internet gets shut down instead of Musk. He's a garbage human being but this level of power should not be centralized.
It already is centralized if one dumbass can turn it off 🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️
?
He's a dbag of the highest order and I hope he cries himself to sleep every night... But no, the US military should NOT be seizing private businesses. I can't believe I even had to say that lol
all things aerospace can be seized as a dual use asset, especially during wartime
We're not at war
Elon is actively sabotaging the military of an American ally, he can go fuck himself I hope they take all of SpaceX from his ass
I didn't know that aerospace could be nationalized so easily. If that's the case I'm for it. But otherwise the idea that we take private enterprise by force is unAmerican and unacceptable to me, no matter how repugnant he is (and he's a fucking repugnant scrotelick)
This is at minimum, a Logan Act violation if you want to get technical about it.
Elon Musk has fucked US Diplomats over, by fucking our ally Ukraine.
We know that someone as rich and popular as Elon is kinda-sorta untouchable. But I'd like to see something done in an ideal world.
0 of the 2 people charged in like 200 years have been convicted under the Logan Act. You might as well say we should nab him for jaywalking.
I mean normally true but what Elon is committing is basically treason.
Not in any legal sense
He's literally and single-handedly sabotaged a Ukrainian mission during wartime.
Nobody's debating that
There is plenty of precedent for nationalizing companies, and for that matter, it doesn't have to be the military one would give it to anyway.
Has the precedent ever been dissatisfaction with the private ownership? Or did we we actually require federalizing the output of those companies for national security reasons?
Genuinely curious because apparently I'm the only one who thinks nationalizing Starlink is an extreme response.
Admittedly, most examples I can think of for nationalizing things withing the US have been either when a vital industry (usually railroads) shuts down due to bankruptcy or labor disputes, or companies partly owned by foreign powers that the US ends up at war with, which I suppose could both be called national security reasons. That being said, while the Ukraine war doesnt directly threaten the security of the US, beyond I suppose the small risk of it somehow dragging the US in directly, its pretty clear that the country is not really neutral in all this either, so at the very least Musk's actions here work directly against US foreign policy goals. Admittedly I do agree that nationalizing starlink is a bit extreme, Im not sure that the US government is necessarily a great choice to run a global internet service, especially one that is somewhat different to other companies of the same type (it operates vastly more satellites to my knowledge than other similar operations), but I do feel that threatening to nationalize SpaceX might be a decent way to get Elon to play ball, so to speak.
@GentlemanLoser @CarbonIceDragon maybe people agree that it is an extreme measure, but see the situation as sufficiently serious and urgent
US Government nationalized AIG and GM during the 2008 financial crisis.
We don't even need to be at war to take a company over. We just need the political will to do so.
We shouldn't nationalize Starlink because its a money losing dumbass idea though. Yeah it helps the Ukrainians, but that's the only valid use, and 4000+ satellites for basically only war seems like a bad idea. Cell phone 5G service will be cheaper in peacetime, and wartime has other communication platforms.
Uhh sorry but this line of thought seems pretty incoherent. Its use case clearly goes beyond just war (e.g. coverage of rural and wild areas where a land line or 5G will not be economical), since StarLink has gone online pretty much every global super power has started or announced building their own constellations, and during wartime you want to have as much redundancy in your systems as you can get, especially so in your lines of communication. And Ukraine is using it right now, during wartime. I can't follow this logic at all.
Bro he's literally helping Russia, he's a traitor to the US. Seize all his assets.
*Seize
Fixed, thanks!
Anytime
Half of all active satellites are now from SpaceX. Here’s why that may be a problem (March 2023)
Why do governments provide Low Earth Orbit to one awful person?
Low Earth orbit is the safest orbit because the orbits will naturally degrade due to friction with the atmosphere and fall back to Earth after a set number of years without a boost.
Higher orbits are much worse because the satellites can be there forever and clog up space. Space is really big though, and we are not close to blotting out the sky with satellites, but we want to encourage the use of low Earth orbit whenever possible so we have control over it.
What I mean is that such a communications system should not be controlled by a private company or a person. That should be under public control.
All true, but blotting out the sky isn't what everyone's afraid of. A chain reaction of space junk impacts that locks us on Earth for a century or two would be the worst case scenario.
Because governments are run by politicians, and they need money for campaigns.
Your daily reminder that Elon Musk is a degenerated cunt.
Imma just delete the meme I made when he turned it on in the first place. This man is a cunt.
EDIT: Looks like I already did when he did something else stupid.
Captain hairplugs is pretty creepy.
My question is how did he know what they were planning? Was he monitoring them? Since he has already admitted talking to Putin, what has he shared with him? I'm starting to wonder how many Ukrainian lives may have been lost because of this guy playing both sides of the fence...
It's hard to hide stuff from the people who manage your communications.
Does Musk speak Ukrainian now? Or were these soldiers speaking english over plain non encrypted means? There's a lot of things that are not adding up to me that involve more than just musk.
Elon Musk has a top-secret clearance due to SpaceX, NASA, and Department of Defense contracts.
That's the thing: this guy STILL has access to the top-secret wartime intelligence networks, today. This is absolutely a problem.
True, but having security clearance doesn't really give you authorization to snoop on communications and act on them. And it kind of blows his excuse of "just wanting to give people netflix to chill" out of the water.
I hope he faces some serious repercussions over all this, but part of me doubts he will.
Who said he spied using Starlink?
He has a fucking top secret clearance. That means US Satellites could probably see the fucking Ukrainians preparing this stuff or something like that.
Top Secret clearance means full access to the US spy information network for fucks sake.
Information he'd have need to know so that he can fly starlink satellites in a way to still let US spy satellites see the war, for example. He just needs a need to know and bam, he will have the authorization to get spy info.
My uncle is a retired intelligence officer for the Marines btw. Top Secret is literally the top secret clearance. No higher clearance exists. All that bullshit with Manning was only at the Secret level for example.
Having Top Secret clearance doesn't automatically give you access to all of the information. As you said, it's still based off need to know, they arent just going to give him all military intelligence related to satellites, they will just give him the specific information they need him to act on.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022%E2%80%932023_Pentagon_document_leaks
Goddamn E3, equivalent to a damn Private First Class, of the National Guard had this level of access.
Come on man. Don't downplay what Top Secret entails. The discord leak just happened a few months ago.
No one is saying that the classification system doesn't need some work. It's just an incomparable situation, Musk isn't going to have months of free reign to just peruse the systems as Jack did.
Counterintuitively it's easier for low level employees to gain access to more, as they have to do more general work that necessitates broader access. In those cases extreme oversight measures should be used, and they were not.
Musk is a russian asset.
I wouldn't quite go that far, but he's at very minimum a "Useful Idiot".
"Useful idiot" is a well-meaning person who can be manipulated to promote a regime. Musk is an asset. He is providing direct material aid to the Russian war effort.
And a child killer. His actions directly allowed a particular Russian troop to target civilian locations.