When Elon Musk posted a personally crafted 280-character “peace plan” for the war in Ukraine last October, a Ukrainian diplomat offered a carefully considered review. It ran to a full two words: “Fuck off”. This week’s allegations that Musk shut down his Starlink system (on which the comms-shattered Ukraine relies to defend itself against Russia) right in the middle of a counteroffensive last year – apparently deliberately to neuter it – forces a new question. When he does finally make it there in his big space rocket, will even Mars be far enough for Elon Musk to fuck off to?
For now, it’s time to take another turn around the block with Phoney Stark, as Musk’s biographer Walter Isaacson reveals that the edgelord magnate (and edgelord magnet) ordered his engineers to switch off the Starlink satellite communications network during a surprise attack on the Russian fleet in Crimea last year. Or to “disrupt” the attack, as CNN puts it, still clinging embarrassingly to the preferred Silicon Valley argot that surely ought to have been discredited once its boy kings started becoming more powerful than many of the world’s actual countries. I can’t help feeling that the benefit-of-the-doubt era with these guys ought to have officially ended back when Y2K fashion was just fashion. Yet until very recently, Musk was still being breathlessly judged a net good to humanity, what with his electric cars and his hyperloops and the fact he once smoked a joint on a podcast. So! Very! Cool! Elon was endlessly covered by the media as a kind of fascinating, eccentric inventor, as opposed to someone with a vast amount of power who should be held to account accordingly. Just as it was with Mark Zuckerberg before him, by the time people realised a lot of what was happening, it was rather too late.
Anyway, back to this strategic Starlink blackout, which was apparently prefaced by Elon wailing to his biographer: “How am I in this war?” The question appears to have been rhetorical, but demands an alternative answer to the one towards which Musk was apparently gesturing (he followed up by explaining that Starlink was “so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good peaceful things, not drone strikes”). You’re in this war because you’re literally a defence contractor – just as you’re in the news this week for demonising the Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL) because you’re literally a media mogul. Man up.
Instead of accepting the complexities of the consequences of his own actions, Musk seems to have simply buzzed in on the answer to that age-old question: how can a just tech god permit suffering? The Ukrainian drones were thus stopped in their tracks, while the Russian fleet remained unharmed and able to launch future attacks itself. Musk himself returned to other based-deity pursuits, such as enabling the dissemination of Moscow propaganda and Twitter-polling what should happen to Ukraine. This last gambit fell squarely in the tradition of the Treaty of Versailles, of course, which famously asked Allied users whether Germany should be punished extra-hard, and offered three options: “Hell yeah”, “Hell no”, and “I don’t care – just show me the numbers”.
It’s not that Musk doesn’t have a consistent worldview so much as he doesn’t even have consistency. Barely a week goes by without him making threats and failing to follow through. By now it should be clear that Musk isn’t going to have a cage fight with Zuckerberg. He isn’t going to sue the ADL. He probably wasn’t even really going to buy X (formerly Twitter), and only ended up going through with it because the courts forced him to. He just says any old stuff for attention or a laugh, or because he can. The key question is whether someone who just says any old stuff for attention or a laugh or because he can should have quite this much supra-democratic power.
Alas, this is not a question being asked by Elon’s fanboys, that whole heaving army of betas out there defending him minute by minute on his own platform, in the hope that he sees their posts and perhaps … what? “likes” them? Oh man. It’s too poignant. Yet the second this latest story about the Starlink shutdown broke, you couldn’t move on X for Muskovites suggesting that if Ukraine doesn’t like the deal it signed up to, it can terminate its contract and sign up to another service. Please let’s put much, much more of our future security in the hands of people who treat war and the fallout from an unsolicited invasion like a broadband contract.
Ultimately, it remains one of the more pathetic tragedies of our age that Musk is seen as a superhero analogue – but perhaps also an inevitable one, given that superheroes connote institutional failure. After all, if society and its institutions were working as they should be, we wouldn’t need them. This is certainly the mood that Musk likes to play into, forever fanning the sense that the world and its problems are too hard to manage for everyone from ordinary people to police chiefs to politicians and supranational bodies. Only recently, he was speaking tellingly of himself as Earth’s “other option” to Mark Zuckerberg. Yes, have no fear, because Elon’s here. Until – as the Ukrainians seem to have discovered at something of a crucial moment – he suddenly isn’t.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
