ELON'S WAR
From his satellites, offered for free to Kiev, to the tweet against Zelensky. Brief history of how it came to be that the richest man in the world also became the one who can influence its destiny
There is one minor scene in the film, which we might title "Elon's War," that stands out for its symbolism. With Musk, in the semi-darkness of the Texas safe house near Tesla headquarters, confiding over the phone to a senior Pentagon official that he is watching on his laptop, through his Starlink satellites, "the whole war as it happens." A sequence, in Ronan Farrow's 8K reconstruction in the New Yorker that, like all great cinema, contains comedy and tragedy. On the one hand the live video game dimension for the nerd turned richest man on the planet. On the other, the realization of his decisive role on the fate of the war in Ukraine and, by translation, the world.
Of tasty scenes and crucial food for thought, the entrepreneur's involvement in Russian-Ukrainian hostilities offers plenty. They come out in bits and pieces in the press, thanks to three particularly relevant contributions. Which, in addition to the Aug. 21 investigation by Woody Allen's "repentant" son, include a multi-handed multimedia piece in the New York Times (July 28) and Walter Isaacson's monumental biography released Sept. 12. Taking from these sources, and putting in my own (over a year ago I wrote a book on the unprecedented power of the gigacapitalists, and the highlight slide of the presentations is devoted precisely to the Musk-Ukraine case), we will put in chronological order the most eloquent of these materials.
Which, in a short narrative arc, testify to an extraordinary dramaturgical evolution of the protagonist: from savior of Kiev to presumed sympathizer of Moscow, from the one who beats the drum with the Pentagon only to partially reconsider. Including the "Oppenheimer moment" in which, terrified of shouldering too great a responsibility in the attack that "could cause World War III," he turns off (we shall see in what terms) the satellites, blinding the Ukrainian counteroffensive. Until the sneering meme-"You haven't asked for a billion in aid in five minutes already"-addressed on Oct. 2 to Zelensky.
THE SAVIOR
Like many of the events surrounding the man, it all begins on the social network formerly known as Twitter, before he bought it. It is February 25, 2022, the day after the invasion began. On the 24th, the Russians pulled down a Viasat satellite used for Ukrainian military communications. The Kiev military is, as far as communications are concerned, in the dark. At 1:06 p.m. Ukrainian Digital Minister Mykhailo Fedorov entrusts his request to a tweet, "@elonmusk, while you try to colonize Mars, Russia tries to occupy Ukraine! While your rockets successfully land from Space, Russian rockets attack Ukrainian civilian population! We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations and invite sane Russians to resist." Less than eleven hours, and 166,000 likes later, comes Musk's response, "Starlink service is now active in Ukraine . And the antennas are already in transit." Two days later Fedorov himself posts an image of a truck, which arrived at its destination amazingly quickly, filled with the first 500 small dishes they will need for ground operations and to coordinate with the allies, American and NATO. The antennas, a little bigger than the screen of a laptop, are mounted in the woods, on buildings, on armored vehicles, and talk to the 4,500 satellites, the size of a couch, that Starlink has been sending into low orbit since 2019, when it still seemed like a crazy bet. The advantage, however, is that since Musk also owns SpaceX, he can rely on reusable rockets that, once used as shuttles for Nasa, return to earth empty. Why not fill them with satellites?
Today the fast Internet service has about 1.5 million subscribers worldwide, who spend $600 for the antenna and a monthly fee in the $75 range. Rates that, if Musk had charged them, would quantify to $80 million the billionaire's gift to Ukraine. A decisive gift, since it reduced the time to locate a target and fire from 20 to one minute. "Starlink is the blood of our communication infrastructure," declares Minister Fedorov. This is repeated by Mykola, the commander who for a time ensures its access to the front lines. "Without Starlink we could neither fly nor communicate," admits another official. Fedorov again, "It is in the range of thousands of lives that Starlink has helped save. It is an essential component of our success." Musk is promoted, in the field, to honorary Ukrainian.
THE TRAITOR
Then comes October 3. At 6:15 p.m., probably tired of the inconclusiveness of the Pope, Erdogan, and Xi Jinping, Musk entrusts his peace plan to the usual Twitter. It consists of four points: "1) Re-run elections in annexed regions under UN supervision. Russia leaves if this is the will of the people. 2) Crimea formally part of Russia, as it has been since 1783 (until Khrushchev's mistake). 3) Water supply assured to Crimea. 4) Ukraine remains neutral," meaning "does not join NATO." He asks his 120 million followers to vote for him and within two hours over two and a half million vote, six out of ten to reject him. Musk, not without pointing out ("Most likely this will be the final outcome anyway: it's just a matter of how many people will die between now and then.") defers - and there would be much to be said about this, too - to the will of the majority.
Not so the Ukrainians. "Fuck you is the very diplomatic answer I give you," tweets Kiev's ambassador to Germany. Zelensky entrusts the same platform with his counter poll: "Which Elon Musk do you prefer, the one who supports Ukraine or the one who supports Russia?" Shit storm follows. At the speed of social networks, the hero becomes a sordid turncoat. He, despite speculation of Asperger's syndrome that would have him with diminished empathy, acknowledges the blow and clarifies, "Out-of-pocket expenses for Starlink coverage in Ukraine so far have been $80 million. Financial support to Russia is zero dollars."
The same figure at which, as he sees it, the chatter stands. How ungrateful, he thinks. And he has some deputy to write a letter to the U.S. Defense Department warning that from now on they will have to bear the cost of the satellite service: around $400 million a year.
"BETTER CALL KAHL"
An experienced man who can navigate the rapids of Mr. Tesla's psyche is urgently needed. For the task, President Biden chooses Colin H. Kahl, a Pentagon veteran. That fateful phone call on the evening of Oct. 7 from a Paris hotel overlooking the Eiffel Tower is also a mother scene in Farrow's vivid chronicle. An attendant immolates himself and to call Elon lends his iPhone to the superior "to spare him the risk of a salvo of colorful text messages and emoji in the middle of the night," in the purest Muskian style. Kahl, who has seen it all, is as flustered as a schoolboy who has to confer with the principal ("Although Musk is not technically a diplomat or statesman, I felt it was important to treat him as if he were, given the influence he wielded," he will say later). The adjective that recurs to describe the talk is "deferential." Fifteen minutes in which Musk would reveal to the military that he had personally spoken with Putin, calling his consultations with the Kremlin "regular," except that he would later deny having "talked about Ukraine" with the Russian leader. On the other hand, Reid Hoffman, CEO of Linkedin who was with Musk at Paypal, reportedly attended an event where the former partner - inciting the audience to make peace with Moscow - "seemed to have been completely taken in by the Putin narrative." On the phone with the Pentagon veteran Musk clarifies his fears: the Ukrainians, in addition to defending themselves, now want to use satellites to attack and regain lost territories; while the Russian ambassador, with whom he is familiar, has made it clear that that is an insurmountable red line that would authorize atomic response. Whether it is true or not he believes it and does not want his fingerprints on the satellite equivalent of Gavrilo Princip's firing. In the end, however, he grants an extension: he will continue to pay for satellites until a date to be determined.
PEARL HARBOR RISK
We have to take a step back a few days. To an evening in late September when the entrepreneur sends a dramatic message to his biographer. The Ukrainian military is about to launch a surprise attack on the Russian fleet in Crimea. It intends to use six small submarine drones, controlled precisely by satellite. There is "a non-trivial possibility," Musk writes, of nuclear war. He speaks of "a small Pearl Harbor," of an escalation he wants nothing to do with. "So he secretly told his engineers to suspend coverage for areas within 100 kilometers of the Crimean border. As a result, the drones lost connection and were pushed ashore by the waves without causing any damage," Isaacson writes in the biography. Damage to the Russians, implied, because for the Ukrainians, it is by all evidence enormous. The biography also reports a long, tense exchange with Minister Fedorov, with Musk closing thus, "Seek peace while you have the upper hand. Let's discuss it (and he includes his new cell phone number). I will support any pragmatic path to achieving peace that will do the general good of humanity." Elsewhere, Mykola, the Ukrainian satellite specialist, recounts, "We were very close to the front line when, having crossed a border, Starlink stopped working. They had to revert to radio communications, "It was chaos."
As it happens, however, this specific paragraph is the only one, so far, that Isaacson has corrected. Musk would not actively "turn off" satellite coverage in Russian-contested areas: it was already so and he just refused to turn it on, for the concerns amply explained. We are on the borders of hermeneutics and theology, between sins of action and sins of omission, but the biographer asked for clarification and got it. "How did I get caught up in this war?" he vented to the memoirist, "Starlink was born so that people could watch Netflix, relax, get online to take classes at school and do nice peaceful things, not drone attacks." Life in peacetime, in short.
A BILL TO FOOT
In June, the Defense Department announced that it had reached an agreement with the billionaire. In truth, even before the famous phone call the SpaceX sales manager was about to sign a $145 million contract, but then Musk had gone soft ("He ended up succumbing to the crap they wrote on Twitter," she later commented). For a company valued at $150 billion and a man being worth about fifty more is a figure within the realm of possible generosity, however, not decided lightly. Even during World War I, billionaires such as J. P. Morgan lent large sums to the Allies, but "Musk's influence is more brazen and extensive. There is little precedent for a civilian becoming the arbiter of a war," writes the New Yorker. Appreciable understatement, since one can safely say "none." And in this case, assesses in the New York Times space consultant Dmitri Alperovitch, "is not just a single company, but a single person. To whose whims and desires we are completely hostage." Worse than public monopolies, notes another respondent, there are only private monopolies. The gigacapitalists sometimes even seems to realize this. Asked specifically in a podcast - "Do you have more influence than the U.S. government?" - he responds impulsively, "In a way, yes."
It is because of this frightening arbitrariness that Taiwan, for example, preferred to make arrangements with the much smaller OneWeb satellite company to prepare for the eventuality of a Beijing attack. After all, it is estimated that about half of all new Teslas are produced in the Shanghai factory. And Chinese President Xi has already made his opposition to Musk's support for Kiev explicit, getting assurances that the same thing would not happen with Taipei. For what it's worth, the word of a man stressed to paroxysmal levels, who goes from online brawls with blameless strangers to sometimes crying during an interview. One who was getting by on Ambien, a powerful hypnotic (which can cause hallucinations), and then discovered ketamine, popular as a recreational drug but also promising in the treatment of depression -- and we don't know what he throws it down for. We do know, however, that at high doses it causes dissociation, both from one's body and from the reality around it. Not exactly the desirable psychic balance for a man who, in fact, in his laptop and without any protocol, has a kind of correlative of the atomic briefcase of the president of the United States. With the obvious difference that he cannot drop a bomb, but he can decide the success or failure of a war.
Which is asking a lot of one man in charge, even should he be wiser than ours. Today he is so concerned about the existential risks posed by artificial intelligence that he has signed a vibrant open letter on the limits to be imposed on it before it is too late: "These decisions should not be delegated to unelected technological leaders." De te fabula narratur, reluctant master of the world.
(Translated by deepl.com)