Yeah like, I can understand a hesitation around being directly involved in a war effort, but mate once you’ve opened your system up to the military you’re kinda already there.
Yeah, but Putin said he'd give me like $10 or whatever in rubles if I did it. Then he called me a chicken... And I'm no chicken and I wanted the $10 so I could get this month's battle pass!
He literally was paid a shit-ton of money by the pentagon to provide service to the Ukranian military. He took the money. And then he's like, "how could I have known they'd use it in WAR?"
It's pretty obvious he got paid by the Russians to sabotage that operation. Which makes him an enemy agent against the US I guess since he sabotaged a military asset the US paid for.
He got paid to let Ukraine use starlink within Ukraines post 2014 borders to defend Ukraine land. Then when Ukraine tries to bomb a Russian navy fleet OUTSIDE OF UKRAINE'S BORDERS and it doesn't work everyone gets mad. I'm all for trashing Elon when it's due, and I trash him a lot, but he was literally playing by the established rules here.
Had he let the Ukrainians bomb the fleet, he would have directly went against the US militaries orders. I get we all want Russia to stop and whatnot, but (and I hate that I'm the one defending him and saying this) Elon didn't do wrong here. The missles were flying correctly in starlink air, they hit the border, then stopped working. Also, this happened last year.
Starlink has a major problem in durability as a result of the low orbit (required for low latency), meaning it's extremely expensive in upkeep.
The satellites inability to talk to eachother, combined with the narrow transmission angle means the system scales very poorly and has numerous bottlenecks (both the satellite and the uplink station). Yes, Starlink is "working on it", but the laser-link solution is very complex in terms of engineering.
Starlink has some amazing usecases, but those usecases can't possible cover the cost. It runs almost entirely on subsidies and venture capital.
If they've picked Musk as their front, they're too incompetent to be worth worrying about.
The motherfucker used his unparalleled view of the battle lines in Ukraine to see that Ukraine (an ally) was launching an offensive against the Russian navy (an enemy), and shut down access, stopping the offensive. The Russian fleet went on to attack Ukrainian civilians, killing children. Musk has also been meeting with Putin. The only reason he's not being tried for treason is the lack of a formal declaration of war against Russia. Musk is incredibly erratic and easily influenced. The government has to deal with him on some matters, but if they're not doing whatever they can to eliminate their reliance on that traitorous moron, they're not going to be capable of getting that mystery hardware to space, let alone using it.