An Elon Musk biographer has come out to rebut Ukrainian claims that the billionaire sabotaged a Ukrainian drone attack by not activating his Starlink satellite communications near Crimea at their request.
"To clarify on the Starlink issue: the Ukrainians THOUGHT coverage was enabled all the way to Crimea, but it was not," Musk biographer Walter Isaacson posted on X Saturday. "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."
SpaceX's Starlink communications was not provided to Ukraine to be "weaponized" for war, but to help Ukraine defend their freedom and their land, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said in February.
The latest controversy rose after The Washington Post quoted an excerpt from Isaacson's upcoming biography "Elon Musk" that wrote the billionaire "secretly told his engineers to turn off coverage within 100 kilometers of the Crimean coast," which resulted in Ukraine's drone subs having "lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly."
"This is the price of a cocktail of ignorance and big ego," Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's adviser Mykhailo Podolyak wrote on X Thursday.
Russia has praised Musk amid the reports, but Ukraine alleged Musk's move permitted Russia's Black Sea fleet to wage attacks on Ukrainian cities, according to Politico.
Isaacson's "Elon Musk" is going to be officially released Tuesday and excerpts revealed the Starlink communications denial by SpaceX surrounding Crimea was effectively sabotaging Ukrainian defenses amid Russia's ongoing war that rages in the south and east of Russia-occupied territory of Ukraine.
Musk reportedly sought to restrict his Starlink communications satellites to just Ukraine territory under its control and not in the contested regions with Russia, preferring his technology to not be "weaponized" for war.
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Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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