Elon Musk confirmed an account by biographer Walter Isaacson, in a biography of Must to be released on Sept. 12, that Musk Musk refused a request from the Kiev regime to extend services from the Starlink satellite communication system to Crimea for an attack they were planning on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, saying he did so to prevent SpaceX from being “complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.”
Musk responded on his social media platform X to new details from the Isaacson book to clarify what happened. “There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol,” Musk said on his media platform X. “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.” (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1699917639043404146)
Ukrainian submarine drones loaded with explosives were approaching the Russian fleet’s anchorage in Sevastopol when they lost connection and “washed ashore harmlessly,” according to Isaacson. Musk was concerned about Russia responding to the naval attack with a nuclear weapon, Isaacson wrote in the book, according to CNN. Ukrainian officials begged him to turn the service back on, but he declined to do it for the Crimea incident (Musk also clarified that the service was never activated in Crimea and that SpaceX deactivated nothing -ed.). “How am I in this war?” Musk asked Isaacson, per CNN. “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.”
Earlier this year, Musk also stressed on X that he reserved the right to turn off the service if needed but claimed he had never done so. “SpaceX commercial terminals, like other commercial products, are meant for private use, not military, but we have not exercised our right to turn them off,” he wrote in February. “We’re trying hard to do the right thing, where the ‘right thing’ is an extremely difficult moral question.”
