Elon Musk says he refused to give Kyiv access to his Starlink communications network over Crimea to avoid complicity in a “major act of war”.
Kyiv had sent an emergency request to activate Starlink to Sevastopol, home to a major Russian navy port, he said.
His comments came after a book alleged he had switched off Starlink to thwart a drone attack on Russian ships.
A senior Ukrainian official says this enabled Russian attacks and accused him of “committing evil”.
Russian naval vessels had since taken part in deadly attacks on civilians, he said.
“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,” he said.
“Why do some people so desperately want to defend war criminals and their desire to commit murder? And do they now realize that they are committing evil and encouraging evil?” he added.
The row follows the release of a biography of the billionaire by Walter Isaacson which alleges that Mr Musk switched off Ukraine’s access to Starlink because he feared that an ambush of Russia’s naval fleet in Crimea could provoke a nuclear response from the Kremlin.
Ukraine targeted Russian ships in Sevastopol with submarine drones carrying explosives but they lost connection to Starlink and “washed ashore harmlessly”, Mr Isaacson wrote.
Starlink terminals connect to SpaceX satellites in orbit and have been crucial for maintaining internet connectivity and communication in Ukraine as the conflict has disrupted the country infrastructure.
SpaceX, in which Mr Musk is the largest shareholder, began providing thousands of Starlink satellite dishes to Ukraine shortly after Russia launched its full-scale assault on its neighbour in February last year.
Responding to the book’s claim, Mr Musk said on X that SpaceX “did not deactivate anything” because it had not been activated in those regions in the first place.
“There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol. The obvious intent being to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor,” he said.
“If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.”
Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, eight years before Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine
In the past, Mr Musk has said that while the system had “become the connectivity backbone of Ukraine all the way up to the front lines”, “we are not allowing Starlink to be used for long-range drone strikes”.
Mr Musk reiterated the point to Mr Isaacson, asking: “How am I in this war? 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.”
He also offered a personal opinion, calling for a truce and saying that Ukrainians and Russians were dying “to gain and lose small pieces of land” and this was not worth their lives.
He provoked anger last year when he proposed a plan to end the war which suggested the world formally recognise Crimea as part of Russia and asking residents of regions seized by Russia last year to vote on which country they wanted to be part of.
Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov said that plan displayed “moral idiocy”
Nationalize Starlink and SpaceX
We already had a nationalized SpaceX. We defunded it and gave grants to private companies like uh… SpaceX.
While I agree that NASA shouldn’t have had any funding cut, supporting a privatized space industry isn’t a bad thing on its own.
But giving Elon Musk a defense contract was a fucking stupid idea.deleted by creator
and we have an idiot in charge who shares his time between defending anti-semitism and interfearing in global conflicts.
Bruh, Trump has been out of office for like 3 years now. Have you been living under a rock?
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Those that live in glass houses should not throw stones.
That “shiny metal detritus” is currently providing internet to Ukraine that allows them to fight in this war.
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@MattMastodon @SCB
It is not his data. He’s just transporter.I’m quite comfortable with it.
If the government wants a private citizen’s data and resources, they can contract with them for it. I find it bizarre that you think the government should just be able to take whatever it wants from people.
If you give them that power, some day, the cause will not be noble.
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Didn’t NASA used to just have companies like Boeing or Lockheed manufacture things?
Private companies been US advantage during the moon race, and allowed them to win against the URSS
Nationalize? I could have sworn I heard ‘NationaSieze the Means of Production’
Nationalise.
It’s a Z in American English. Both spellings are correct.
Nope, it comes from Old French which used the same “s” as Latin whereas the “z” is greek. The French standardised to the “s” in the late 1600 which informed the English which had bounced between the Greek and Latin but formalised on “ise” not “ize”.
So, nationalise is the correct one here.
You’re entitled to your hill, but as linguistically correct as you may be, linguistics take a back seat to common usage and national variance.
Nationalized and nationalised are both English terms. Nationalized is predominantly used in 🇺🇸 American (US) English ( en-US ) while nationalised is predominantly used in 🇬🇧 British English (used in UK/AU/NZ) ( en-GB ).
Yeah what kind of linguistics dweeb doesn’t understand that language is fluid and shapes with time and location.
I’d love to see this tool be held to the spelling standards of old English. You know… to preserve the English language.
Butan hwi?
Literally the first thing you learn in linguistics is that the malleability in language is why linguistics exists.
Which is literally why “literally” and “figuratively” as practically interchangable due to misuse of ‘literally’ as hyperbole. Its figuratively killing me.
This is the hidden most based take in the thread.
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How is dismissing a correction with a blunt “nope” nice and tacking on etymology when we’re talking about modern use of the word?
Oh, get bent, you bell-end! There is no point in trying to be nice and discuss things on here any more; let’s be honest. You lot just love to circle-jerk how much you hate Musk to the detriment of everything else. God buoye ond god spede.
FTFY.
Everyone should just report this idiot and move on. You can’t fix stupid.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nationalize
You thought you were smart to correct what you thought was a mistake. You were mistaken, because you’re less smart than you think you are, and not smart enough to know that you don’t know that much.
Rather than admit that you’re less smart than you think you are, you’ve doubled down and become rude about it.
Vanity, it’s the devil’s favourite sin.
Obviously, it’s pathetic. We’ve all been there, but you really should learn when to walk away rather than doubling down.
Wow, this really upset a bunch of the Lemmy toxic club didn’t jt. Honestly, Reddit may be crap but lemmy is doing it’s best to ape it’s toxicity.
You came up in here with your irrelevant pedantry and you call other people toxic.
Nobody gives a fuck how you spell nationalize you gobshite
Upvoting for gobshite
Jeez dude, can we all just chill out for a second?
God damn just accept you’re wrong. You look like an absolute fool at this point.
Yes, for sure. You are indeed being toxic.
There’s obviously a lot of crossover between musk-dislikers and z-worshippers.
Butbut… “gEt BeNt YoU bElLeNd” though
From https://www.etymonline.com/word/-ize#etymonline_v_25713 :
-ize
word-forming element used to make verbs, Middle English -isen, from Old French -iser/-izer, from Late Latin -izare, from Greek -izein, a verb-forming element denoting the doing of the noun or adjective to which it is attached.
The variation of -ize and -ise began in Old French and Middle English, perhaps aided by a few words (such as surprise, see below) where the ending is French or Latin, not Greek. With the classical revival, English partially reverted to the correct Greek -z- spelling from late 16c. But the 1694 edition of the authoritative French Academy dictionary standardized the spellings as -s-, which influenced English.
In Britain, despite the opposition to it (at least formerly) of OED, Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Times of London, and Fowler, -ise remains dominant. Fowler thinks this is to avoid the difficulty of remembering the short list of common words not from Greek which must be spelled with an -s- (such as advertise, devise, surprise). American English has always favored -ize. The spelling variation involves about 200 English verbs.
So in 1694 “-ise” was deemed correct in French, but English has always bounced around between the two spellings, both before and since then. American English has always favoured “-ize” spellings. It’s not really reasonable to try to impose the standards of French in 1694 on English globally in 2023.
Thank you for turning dickish pedantry into something actually interesting and worth reading.
And why, dare I ask, should the French form of the suffix be prioritized over the Greek? Latin actually used the Z when the suffix was borrowed from Greek. In French, the letter Z essentially didn’t exist, as even in Latin it was (nearly?) exclusively used for Greek loans. As French evolved from vulgar and unwritten Latin, the Z was replaced by S, which is pronounced as /z/ when between vowels anyway.
So again, why exactly must English hold the etymologically corrupted French form above the actual original one?
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It’s not about what must be done. It’s about what has been done. Language isn’t about how things should have been. One person rarely gets much of a say in how language will develop. If you try to hold language up to best possible practices, you will be disappointed by the actual outcome every time.
Well, in the spirit of what has been done, -ize has been standardized in American English, and so here we are.
What a worthless comment
I mean, the irony here is quite strong even you must sense it.
Nope. Everyone just thinks youre a joke worthy of a circus act.
Yep
People learn words in different fashions. In Jeopardy (an American quiz show) they accept written answers in the last round that are spelled incorrectly as long as it’s clear, phonetically, what they were trying for.
This is done in part because some people learn words by hearing them and not seeing them written, just like some people might have read a word but not know how to pronounce it.
Did you comment this to be superior or be helpful because it comes across as superior.
To add the same low level of information and discourse that all of these click bait, musk hate posts of late contribute to “news” and “technology”.
Did you comment to feel superior or were you feeling left out?
Neither. I was trying to give you the benefit of the doubt that others didn’t and share something I learned that gave me a different perspective.
Just like I’m treating this question as genuine, though I suspect it’s snark.
This is the same bullshit take propagandists and Musk himself are spreading.
Musk sabotaged an active military operation in an effort to save Russian assets and materials, by disabling access to Starlink in that area, to halt the operation. And then refused to undo what he did.
All to protect Russian assets in an illegal undeclared war of annexation where Russia is the aggressor.
Musks actions enabled the death of thousands of civilians in Ukraine and likely will cause far more through his actions which extend how long this illegal invasion will continue.
Musk should be stripped of his US citizenship and booted right back to South Africa. America stands by Ukraine, South Africa tries to pretend they are neutral but the agreements they have with Russia and the opinions of rich fuck South Africans like Musk make it clear they stand with Russia.
And anyone who keeps spreading these press releases with his propagandist take on the subject rather than saying how things actually happened, should be ashamed of themselves and monitored until all this is over.
Musk is operating with full oversight by the US defense agencies. Nothing he does, says, or plans is safe from US spies. He has handlers. He is a high level strategic asset for the USA and his Starlink system is a strategic project for the US military regime. There is absolutely no way he did this without their knowledge and approval.
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Jesus. It says it all.
He is responsible for the deaths of children.
It’s okay, he plans to replace them with his own progeny. What’s he up to now, 12?
His father is even crazier about this, seriously. His father is very active, creating more muskeets …
Not much of a story, if he wouldn’t be doing it with Elon’s stepsister.
Lol…he switched it off as a personal favor to Putin.
It was never turned on in the first place. Read the article, not the clickbait headlines that have circulated (this one is on point though, credit to BBC)
Doubt it. The smart money says that he did it because he does a ton of business with the Chinese and is very nervous about being seen to actively take sides in a way that would cause them to see him as a potential security threat.
Hey guys, look, this guy can read minds!
It’s clearly speculation, calm down
You would have a point were I simply speculating, but I’m not.
I am simply stating what the most well-informed and knowledgeable sources are saying.
You would know this if you had sanitized and healthy media consumption habits, but you obviously don’t.
You are far too confident in your knowledge of the world.
Starlink is a strategic asset for the US military. It’s primary revenue stream comes from the US government. China is on record as saying Starlink itself is a threat.
And the reason it’s a threat is because each orbit has a limited carrying capacity for satellites. Starlink is occupying a specific orbit that is strategically valuable for battlefield information services. The US military is funding it in as a race to occupy the orbit faster and more thoroughly than China because there is no current legal regime for limiting who can occupy an orbit and how they must share it after saturation. Therefore, the existence of Starlink itself is a threat to China, and China has said so.
The idea that China is fine with Musk but not if he does this one specific war thing is based entirely on believing the delusion of Musk as a private business person who is just out to make a buck and has no politics. China doesn’t believe that, the USA doesn’t believe that, the billionaire class doesn’t believe that. Only the class-unconscious proles seem to believe it.
Musk is deeply enmeshed in the USA’s project for hegemony. He is operating with significant oversight and collaboration with US government agencies for US power projection domestically and abroad.
This is a convenient fiction for your narrative, but it ignores the fact that far from being OK with what Musk has done with his Starlink satellite network, the US security establishment is currently freaking out over the level of autonomy that a private citizen has gained with regard to something that clearly has international security implications.
This would scarcely be the case were it so, as you argue, that Musk is somehow beholden to the US national security establishment.
And that’s leaving aside the obvious point that Musk himself is openly hostile to the current administration.
In other words, nothing you say actually pencils out. It’s all bullshit.
You want to source your evidence for the US security establishment currently freaking out? Consider that it was the former head of the CIA’s investment arm that got SpaceX the funding it needed, potentially from that fund but we can’t know. Consider that the vast majority of SpaceX payloads are military intelligence payloads. Consider that SpaceX has hired multiple former US officials to high positions within the company.
Consider that none of his lucrative relationships are with Biden or Biden appointees but with generals and other military officials that do not change with the administration. Consider that the Starlink project underwent research and development in conjunction not with the Trump administration but with the Air Force directly. Consiser that Obama refused to give weapons to Ukraine and it was, in fact, the Trump administration that was the first US administration ever to provide them with weapons.
Whatever silly little narrative about red vs blue you think is happening here, it’s delusion. Whatever belief you have about the sanctity of the private company and it’s complete separation from the intelligence community, it’s fantasy. The military intelligence apparatus regularly puts its agents into jobs in corporate America, particular in positions with influence and access to information.
No one is sending spy satellites into orbit with direct and constant military intelligence oversight. From the investment through design, planning, and operations, intelligence is all over Musk’s work day in and day out.
The people who are freaking out are either outsiders who are enjoying the attention/grifting in the culture wars, or it’s deliberate propaganda from insiders.
And it’s not limited to SpaceX. It’s well documented just how much intelligence and state department officials participate in corporate America, from social media (Facebook, Twitter, Google, the US TikTok) to telecom (AT&T, Verizon, StarLink, Google) to high tech (Google, Intel, Oracle, Palantir) to weapons (look it up) to finance (In-Q-Tel, Cerberus, Paladin, BIA). And that doesn’t even cover all of the active duty officers who take jobs in US companies with overseas offices in order to create a cover for their presence.
This isn’t shit the USA leaves to emotions and temper tantrums of celebrities. This is war with America’s second most important opponent in the world. Musk doesn’t buy one of the State Dept’s and intelligence’s most leveraged propaganda company (Twitter), when it already has a dozen officers already there, when it has to go through the FTC, when it’s heavily integrated into the financial network, without having handlers.
There is no universe in which I feel myself obliged to read and respond to your wall of text.
I think you have mistaken me for someone who actually gives a fuck about your long-winded, deeply uninformed and rather dreary opinion.
You would be doing yourself a kindness by reserving such rants for those who actually give a shit about what you have to say.
Which media sources do you advice ?
I won’t name any specific organizations, but the upshot is that you need to consume a variety of news sources from different countries and in different formats. It also pays to get into very specifically focused news organizations.
Ok…
Correct imo
The up arrow is right there, bud
👎
Go away, trumper.
Censorship is terrible. Except when I want to do it and pretend like I’m the best politician. Then it’s great.
LOL self-defense is escalation now
Pretty sure putin owns musk.
Musk does what putler tells him to do.
Russia has anti satellite weapons. Why should he risk it for zero reward? At least the defense contractors are getting paid. Elon does it for free.
Yeah, sure. Have you ever heard of ‘reactions to actions’? What do you think would happen if Russia were to start targeting foreign satellites? How confident are you that they actually possess the technology to disable around 2000 out of the 4000 Starlink satellites to clear paths above Russia/Ukraine? Or, what do you think Russia is capable of in this regard? and did you really belive musk does this for free and with no ulterior idea? 😂😂😂, but there’s no such thing as free. Here’s just one example: Link to CNBC article on Pentagon awarding SpaceX a Ukraine contract for Starlink satellite internet https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/01/pentagon-awards-spacex-with-ukraine-contract-for-starlink-satellite-internet.html
Why ISPs need to be neutral. Musk was never elected or appoints be a general. Otis not his place to decide what strikes happen or not. The blood of the people those ships have attacked are now on his hands.
From my understanding, he didn’t pull the rug, instead he just never turned on satellites that he never said he would turn on
He did in fact “pull the rug”
Elon Musk secretly ordered his engineers to turn off his company’s Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last year to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet, according to an excerpt adapted from Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the eccentric billionaire titled “Elon Musk.”
As Ukrainian submarine drones strapped with explosives approached the Russian fleet, they “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,” Isaacson writes.
The escalation he was trying to avoid is shelling children. Elon Musk is why I hope hell is real.
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Now there’s a great idea. Especially since he never would have built SoaceX without so much public support via NASA.
Get fucked, you boot licking weasel.
“Moral idiocy” is a great way to sum it up
