Apparently, the US Department of Defense had a $145 million check “able to hand to me, literally,” SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell told Walter Isaacson, in response to CNN. “Then Elon succumbed to the bullshit on Twitter.”
Elon Musk had been supplying web connectivity in Ukraine through SpaceX’s Starlink free of charge. In October, the corporate told the US government that it wouldn’t proceed the free service. After the story went public, Musk modified his mind: “The hell with it … we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt free of charge.”
“Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars.”
“How am I on this war?” Musk asked, in response to CNN’s accounting of an excerpt of Isaacson’s book. “Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars. It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for college and do good peaceful things, not drone strikes.”
The CNN report relies on reporting from Isaacson’s latest biography without saying how Isaacson did it. As an example, Musk “secretly ordered his engineers to show off his company’s Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last yr to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet,” CNN writes, citing Isaacson’s book. It’s unclear from CNN’s accounting how Isaacson knows this, though perhaps it is going to be clearer once the book is out.
The report goes on, “As Ukrainian submarine drones strapped with explosives approached the Russian fleet, they ‘lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,’ Isaacson writes.” CNN doesn’t address how Isaacson confirmed that the drones required web or how he knows that they washed ashore.
I’m slightly skeptical about this story since it looks as if the sort of thing a journalist covering the war in Ukraine might need reported earlier. It’s possible Isaacson has some sources on the bottom there, but and not using a copy of the book — or CNN noting how Isaacson did his reporting — it’s hard to know. It’s a remarkably big claim, and for giant claims, I like proof of labor. I’m rather more comfortable with Isaacson directly quoting Shotwell and Musk.
After the CNN story published, Musk denied that Starlink was energetic in that region on the time. “SpaceX didn’t deactivate anything,” he said on Twitter. “There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all of the option to Sevastopol,” he went on, without saying which government had made the request. “If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX can be explicitly complicit in a serious act of war and conflict escalation.”
The CNN story is great publicity for Isaacson’s book — it’s the newest of several excerpts which have recently surfaced — and it actually makes Elon Musk look powerful.