Elon Musk Single-Handedly Averts World War III

Super villain Elon Musk is in the news again. Well, he’s always in the news, so strike the opening sentence. The headline of a Daily Beast article proclaimed, “Musk Secretly Used Starlink to Foil Ukrainian Drone Attack on Russian Ships: Report”

No worries though, most of you didn’t get past the headline. Click, whirr — confirmation bias confirmed. Read, record, “Elon Musk bad.”; continue scrolling.

You probably didn’t get past the headline of my post either. I’m guilty of it too.

Elon Musk secretly ordered SpaceX engineers to switch off the Starlink satellite communications network near the coast of occupied Crimea in order to thwart a Ukrainian surprise attack on Russia’s naval fleet, according to the Daily Beast.

Turns out he was asked to switch on.

“To clarify on the Starlink issue: the Ukrainians THOUGHT coverage was enabled all the way to Crimea, but it was not.” according to a post on X from Walter Isaacson. “They asked Musk to enable it for their drone sub attack on the Russian fleet. Musk did not enable it, because he thought, probably correctly, that would cause a major war.

“The onus is meaningfully different if I refused to act upon a request from Ukraine vs. made a deliberate change to Starlink to thwart Ukraine.” Elon said in an X post. “At no point did I or anyone at SpaceX promise coverage over Crimea. Moreover, our terms of service clearly prohibit Starlink for offensive military action…