How Elon Musk Pretends to Be a Nice Guy

Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

On 7 September 2023, an article from CNN that was based upon Walter Isaacson’s new bio-book, Elon Musk, said that Musk had turned down the insistence from the governments of America and Ukraine to enable them to possibly destroy Russia’s largest naval base, which is in the Crimean region of Russia — a naval base that Ukraine claims to be Ukrainian territory though it had been Russian territory from 1783 to 1954 when the Soviet dictator Khrushchev arbitrarily transferred Crimea from Russia to Ukraine — and that Musk did it (blocked that) because Russia’s Government had told him that if such an invasion would succeed, then Russia would use any means necessary in order to defeat Ukraine, up to and including a nuclear attack against the United States itself. In Russia’s view, Crimea is Russian territory again since the 16 March 2014 plebiscite produced more than 90% voting to rejoin Russia; and, so, any Ukrainian invasion of it would be a Ukrainian invasion of Russia. (Independent Gallup polling of Crimeans, done both before and after that plebiscite, likewise showed — both times — that over 90% of Crimeans wanted and supporting Crimea’s being returned to Russia. No sane person any longer denies that those people had voted that they are Russians and that they rejected the February 2014 U.S.-coup-imposed rabidly anti-Russian regime, which overthrew and replaced the neutralist leaders whom they had helped to elect. The evidence was clear that, just as Crimeans had had no say in 1954 on being handed over to Ukraine, they overwhelmingly refused now to become ruled by the rabidly anti-Russian Obama-regime in Washington DC.)

On 8 September 2023, CBS News headlined “Elon Musk says he denied Ukraine satellite request to avoid complicity in ‘major act of war’ vs. Russia”, and reported that,

Tech billionaire Elon Musk has said that he prevented a Ukrainian attack on a Russian Navy base last year by declining Kyiv’s request to activate internet access in the Black Sea near Moscow-annexed Crimea. Satellite internet service Starlink, operated by Musk-owned company SpaceX, has been deployed in Ukraine since shortly after it was invaded by Russia in February 2022.

“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,” Musk posted Thursday on X, formerly named Twitter.

Elon Musk

Replying to @MarioNawfal

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.

If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and and conflict escalation.

10:48 PM · Sep 7, 2023

Musk was posting in response to a published excerpt of an upcoming biography of the tech tycoon by Walter Isaacson.

In the excerpt published by The Washington Post on Thursday, Isaacson wrote that in September last year, “The Ukrainian military was attempting a sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet based at Sevastopol in Crimea by sending six small drone submarines packed with explosives, and it was using Starlink to guide them to the target.”

Musk had “spoken to the Russian ambassador to the United States… (who) had explicitly told him that a Ukrainian attack on Crimea would lead to a nuclear response,” Isaacson wrote.

Musk “secretly told his engineers to turn off coverage within 100 kilometers of the Crimean coast. As a result, when the Ukrainian drone subs got near the Russian fleet in Sevastopol, they lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly”, according to Isaacson.

Mr. Isaacson headlined in the Washington Post, on 7 September 2023, “The untold story of Elon Musk’s support for Ukraine”, with an excerpt from the book, which said that Musk had warned Ukraine’s government that “Russia will stop at nothing, nothing, to hold Crimea. This poses catastrophic risk to the world.” (He didn’t say “World War Three” — he wasn’t that direct.) Musk gave this as his reason for saying no to Zelensky and to Biden. He pretended to be working against war, not to make money from war. But the Biden Administration decided that since Musk wouldn’t simply donate to Ukraine the satellite linkage it had needed in order to be able to destroy Russia’s Sevastopol (Russia’s largest) naval base, American taxpayers would simply buy from his Starlink the right to control it there and provide that ability to Ukraine, so that, in the future, whatever the U.S. and Ukrainian governments want to use Starlink for there, they’ll be able to do it. This matter was basically a financial issue for Musk, and he got the money he wanted from it, as Isaacson explained:

In the end, … SpaceX made arrangements with various government agencies to pay for increased Starlink service in Ukraine, with the military and CIA working out the terms of service. More than 100,000 new satellite dishes were sent to Ukraine at the beginning of 2023. In addition, Starlink launched a companion service called Starshield, which was specifically designed for military use. SpaceX licensed Starshield satellites and services to the U.S. military and other agencies, allowing the government to determine how they could and should be used in Ukraine and elsewhere.

Then, on 27 September 2023, Bloomberg News headlined “Elon Musk Wins US Space Force Contract for Starshield”, and reported that, “The previously undisclosed ‘task order’ adds to SpaceX’s growing portfolio of Pentagon business. That includes its competition against United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co., to send up national security payloads, as well as a June Pentagon contract of undisclosed value to provide Starlink satellite communications to the Ukraine military and a Falcon 9 launch of 13 satellites this month for the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency.” Musk, still pretending to be somehow an advocate for peace not war, was quoted as saying that “Starlink needs to be a civilian network, not a participant to combat. Starshield will be owned by the US government and controlled by DoD Space Force.”

What Musk had actually done there is to place himself into position to become quite possibly the world’s biggest and most successful war-profiteer — all the while pretending (to his many libertarian admirers) to be trying to ward-off an escalation of official Washington’s war since 1945 to turn Russia into yet another American colony.

Musk, on one occasion, actually revealed himself publicly as what he really is: On 5 August 2022, I headlined “How Bolivia’s 2019 coup exemplified millennia of global history” and wrote about Musk’s 24 July 2022 tweet, which responded to a tweet that had accused him of having been behind the coup that had replaced Bolivia’s democratically elected and highly successful progressive President Evo Morales, who had been resisting Musk’s attempt to steal Bolivia’s lithium: Musk tweeted “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” He was responding as-if he were John Galt, the hero in the libertarian novelist Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged. He is anything BUT an anti-imperialist. He very much IS an imperialist.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.