Elon Musk infamously paid $44 billion to purchase Twitter, and on Tuesday, his pricey platform was promoting a hashtag dedicated to eviscerating him over his decision to deny the Ukraine military access to Starlink over Russian-occupied Crimea.
Also the source of this is apparently a biography written by the former CEO of CNN, Mark Isaacson. Is this correct?
I’m all for hanging this guy out to dry but seems like a play to pump CNN numbers because Elon outrage usually goes viral. It’s a bit sus.
Has any other entity actually confirmed these claims?
Also, aren’t there regulations that would prevent an individual or company from doing a unilateral decision like this? I think it’s called ITAR or something.
The bigger issue here is the allegation that he actively turned it off to thwart an attack.
He has not admitted to that.
That's a serious allegation if true, and the author has retracted the claim. There's no proof (yet anyway). Ukraine has not come forward saying starlink ever worked in Crimea prior to this incident.
The agreement was that the service would only be enabled within Ukraine mainland. This was accomplished by automatically turning them off any time they left Ukraine mainland. Elon refused to disable or expand the territory limit.
Which is absolutely counter to United States interests. And it's not like Russian submarines were filled with schools and hospitals. You can't name a better example of a military target.
But it's not the original story that he turned them off in the middle of the attack.
US sanctions from early 2022 forbid supplying any sort of telecommunications, including by satellite, over territory controlled by sanctioned nations, like Russia.
Crimea was, and still is, territory controlled by Russia. Until Russia gets kicked out of Crimea, nobody from the US is allowed to provide telecom services over Crimea, unless they get a special exception.
According to some articles, there was a call to the White House along with the Ukrainians... but apparently after the fact.
It would seem the Ukrainians tried to make it a sneaky operation and only called Musk at the last moment, when the drones were already underway, instead of coordinating beforehand.
The spirit of the law, in this case, is clearly spelled out, multiple times: do what they tell you, don't do what they tell you not to. It's not up to interpretation. Whether intentionally or not, Musk did what he was required to.