Musk, Starlink and hypocrisy: Elon’s “Benedict Arnold” moment shows U.S. can’t have it both ways

In an excerpt from a new biography on Elon Musk, author Walter Isaacson alleges the SpaceX owner admitted to secretly ordering engineers at SpaceX’s satellite-internet company Starlink to turn off the network, sabotaging a Ukrainian military operation. As reported by CNN, the Starlink service would have allowed Ukraine to run Russia’s Black Sea Fleet out of Ukrainian turf via surprise ambush by drone submarines. 

Isaacson is the former editor of Time magazine and a current history professor at Tulane University. His prior work includes highly acclaimed biographies of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein. 

On Thursday night, Musk only partially disputed the account — saying he refused a 2022 emergency request from Ukrainian officials to activate Starlink service in the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, currently occupied by Russian forces. The Crimean coast is a critical point of control in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and upending Russia’s legendary Black Sea Fleet would almost certainly mark a significant turning point in the war. 

Citing conversations with Musk, Isaacson reports Musk personally sabotaged the Ukraine operation as it was in-progress, secretly directing Starlink engineers to “turn off coverage within 100 kilometers of the Crimean coast. As a result, when the Ukrainian drone subs got near the Russian fleet in Sevastopol, they lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly.” 

In a tweet, Musk denied deactivating the coverage — but also defended his move to deny emergency requests.

“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.”

I can answer that question for Musk. He’s in this war because he aggressively lobbied for — and four months ago successfully won — a Pentagon contract. Specifically, Musk was contracted to provide the Ukraine with battlefield communications via Starlink so Ukraine could defend against Russian invasion and root out occupiers of its territory — territory like the Crimean coast. 

But that doesn’t seem to matter to Musk now that he’s seemingly crowned himself Ukraine’s de-facto turn-coat. 

“Both sides should agree to a truce. Every day that passes, more Ukrainian and Russian youth die to gain and lose small pieces of land, with borders barely changing. This is not worth their lives,” he tweeted Thursday. 

Musk wanted in this war, and now that he’s in it, he’s admitted to sabotaging the side that contracted him. And none of us should be surprised. In October 2022, Musk proposed just letting Russia have, via referendum, whatever Ukrainian territory it had already invaded and occupied. One wonders if Musk would agree to hand over half of SpaceX in appeasement if some gun-toting maniacs broke into his launch sites. 

Or if he would reply as Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany did, with “F*** off is my very diplomatic reply.”

And no one should be surprised that SpaceX was wielded like a weapon in this way, either. Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s chief operating officer and president, told CNBC’s Michael Sheetz in 2022 that SpaceX was “really pleased to be able to provide Ukraine connectivity and help them in their fight for freedom.”

That sentiment was immediately undermined, however, when she waffled nonsensically, seemingly oblivious to how freedom is won in warfare. In her caveats, she noted reports of Ukrainian soldiers using Starlink “for drones” in March 2022, and said their use “for the military is fine, but our intent was never to have them use it for offensive purposes.” 

In the same interview, Shotwell’s ridiculous remarks also hinted at Starlink’s recently revealed Benedict Arnold moment.

“I’m not going to go into the details; there are things that we can do to limit their ability to do that … there are things that we can do and have done,” Shotwell said.

How do Shotwell and Musk think this “fight for freedom” works exactly? Should Ukraine politely ask Russia (if they wouldn’t mind terribly, whenever they get a few minutes, if it wouldn’t be too inconvenient, of course, no worries if not) to please perhaps consider scootching-over the massive Russian Black Sea Fleet just a wee smidge — just so that it isn’t, you know, illegally  occupying Ukraine via military force and killing its civilians?

Musk said his sabotage was to prevent a “mini Pearl Harbor.” But a Thursday tweet from a senior Ukrainian official suggests Musk’s sabotage may have done the exact opposite, accusing Musk of ensuring Ukrainian civilian deaths and “committing evil.”

“Sometimes a mistake is much more than just a mistake. By not allowing Ukrainian drones to destroy part of the Russian military (!) fleet via Starlink interference, Elon Musk allowed this fleet to fire Kalibr missiles at Ukrainian cities. As a result, civilians, children are being killed,” said Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak. 

If that’s true, Musk has Ukrainian blood on his hands. 

Isaacson further says Musk conferred with the Russian ambassador to the United States, and President Joe Biden in making the decision. 

Let this be a lesson to the U.S. legislative and executive branches: You can’t have it both ways when it comes to Elon Musk and Big Tech. You’re dealing with an unregulated erratic billionaire while crossing your fingers that he doesn’t do what all unregulated erratic billionaires do — whatever they want, whenever they want, however they want, with near-total impunity. You either regulate Big Tech and billionaires, or you let them run your world unchecked. 

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Musk is being asked by Congress to maintain a free-speech social media platform as a politically disinterested third party, and to be a politically neutral partner to NASA. Meanwhile, the Republican-led House Oversight Committee has turned its Twitter.com investigations into political theater, as the party seeks to smack the platform over its head for allegedly colluding with the government and potentially interfering with an election, even as U.S. intelligence agencies secretly use the site as a surveillance honeypot. None of which has stopped Republicans from jumping to Musk’s aid to defend him from Federal Trade Commission investigations. 

Even now, as he faces class action lawsuits over mass-firings at Twitter, Congress is still asking Musk to provide some sort of genius insight into the looming artificial intelligence crisis. And finally, in becoming a Defense Department contractor for a war that he’s now apparently bored with, Musk has turned himself into a walking conflict of interest. The Biden administration has handed him the power to decide the fate of global conflicts, with results that mean the life and death of U.S. allies.

So pick a lane, feds. You can not simultaneously give this man the power to decide the results of global conflict, while also demanding his companies somehow remain politically neutral players. You can’t say that Musk meets the standards necessary to be a Pentagon contractor, while also saying he’s so reckless that he needs to be investigated by the FTC. So which is it going to be? 

As the U.S. Supreme Court weighs the role and impact of Big Tech in America’s political and democratic landscape, the government’s foolish hypocrisy toward tech billionaires has spiraled so wildly that those billionaires are now taking over actual segments of the U.S. with an invitation to establish their own governments. The government’s repeated refusals to regulate billionaires — and the entirely predictable consequences that have followed — are evidence of nothing so much as this country’s determination to accelerate the collapse of its own democratic governance. 

In which case, maybe Elon’s right. Maybe the way to solve the problem of billionaires invading and occupying the country’s actual land and it’s democratic processes is to just take those billionaire’s territory and money by force. Then maybe we should hold a referendum, as he suggested about Russia and the Ukraine, and vote on whether they get to keep any of what we took.

Better yet, let’s get it over with and take one last vote on the whole shebang: All in favor of handing over total control to billionaires whom we can never vote out of power, say aye!