Elon Musk: Ukraine hero or villain?

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Elon Musk responded to calls for supporting the Ukrainian cause by donating thousands of Starlink satellite units to the country. In essence, the move provided free internet to areas where the commodity was inaccessible via a satellite internet constellation built by Musk’s SpaceX.

Yet now for CNN and the New York Times, Musk’s heroism has faded away.

According to an excerpt from Walter Isaacson’s new biography Elon Musk, the entrepreneur ordered Starlink’s services near the Crimean coast be switched off last year, disrupting a Ukrainian sneak attack on Russian warships, thus avoiding what Musk labels a “mini-Pearl Harbor.”

“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,” Musk told Isaacson.

In a since deleted tweet, Zelensky advisor Mykhailo Podolyak wrote that “a result [of Starlink’s supposed deactivation is that] civilians, children are being killed. This is the price of a cocktail of ignorance and big ego.”

Now Musk claims that “the Starlink regions in question were not activated,” suggesting that what really occurred was his refusal to make his company an accomplice in a major escalation.

“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 conflict escalation,” Musk responded.