Since Twitter has nothing to do with Tesla (beyond the emotionally stunted owner) this is serious line being crossed. I mean - I don't care about Tesla. But I do care about SpaceX and Starlink as they have serious geopolitical implications.
Some country's leader disses Twitter and they don't get to launch satellites. Or their people don't get satellite internet.
This amount of power should not be in the hands of one rich guy with an inferiority complex.
SpaceX and starlink are dead in the water and utterly useless until Musk has them taken away. As long as he's running those, they're just shitty companies with lots of empty promises
I wouldn't say they're quite dead in the water but he definitely has plenty of power to enshitify them.
He already shut off the Ukraine from starlink when he felt like it.
Tit for tat Disney and Tesla.
If he fucks with SpaceX though, NASA can just stop dealing with them. They would go real quick from being profitable to begging for people to use their service.
If he starts getting a lot of back pressure from the EU and US on what he can launch, I can put a serious dent in his wallet.
"when he felt like it" isn't exactly correct, he specifically didn't allow them to use starlink to launch attacks on Russia, as it was meant to be used only for defense.
Because Republicans gutted NASA for decades. They absolutely loathed that it was a generally beloved program by everyone. And for every dollar of funding saw multiple times that in the value it created. What SpaceX did wasn't something that NASA had never thought of. They just never had the funding to really pursue it. And especially in the wasteful manner Elon musk has.
The mars thing is really a small part of what they do, although it gets the press. They are pretty much the only real game in town for satellite launches, and, I think ISS transport (especially since Soyez is Russian and there's not a lot of good will going on there...). Even Amazon uses them for launches. It's approaching monopoly status for critical infrastructure (we're very dependant on satellites as a society now).
Mars is a labour of love for future ambition, but it's not the main show.
Whether the root cause is historically poor NASA funding or not (I think there's a strong argument for competition and private sector IF it's properly governed, but it never is...), the fact is that we've created a situation where vast amounts of geopolitical control rest with a single person.