The Elon Musk Paradox: How am I in this war?

Elon Musk vs. the War Machine

Oh dear, it seems the darling of the technocrat class, Elon Musk, has sinned against the Church of Self-Destruction and the brethren of the military-industrial complex.

More than 20,000 Starlink terminals were donated by Musk to Ukraine after Russia destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure at the beginning of the war in February 2022. These were donated for civilian use.

However, the military plan was for Starlink satellites to aid Ukraine’s heroic resistance in a Pearl Harbor-style attack on Russia’s Black Sea fleet. But the high Lord of nerds denied the laptop bombardiers their desired escalation.

His reasoning? Starlink wasn’t designed for warfare; it was meant to provide people with the ability to stream Netflix, engage in peaceful online activities, and maybe even do some homework.

“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,” he said in response to the post on X.

The system was to control underwater droids that would attack the Russian fleet.

A new Musk biography, reveals his shock at Ukraine’s intentions. “How am I in this war?” he asked while ordering engineers not to activate Starlink over Crimea last year. His reasoning? That an attack on Crimea would prompt Russia to use nuclear weapons, a threat he believed.

ELON PREVENTS NUCLEAR WAR?

Elon Musk covertly instructed his engineers to deactivate Starlink's satellite communications network during a MAJOR Ukrainian offensive.

This action was taken to intentionally thwart a surprise attack by Ukraine against the Russian naval fleet.

The… pic.twitter.com/I0RtYVuzth

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) September 7, 2023

But of course, Musk’s decision didn’t sit well with Ukrainian officials and their supporters. One top aide to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy took to social media to lash out at Musk, accusing him of allowing the Russian fleet to bombard Ukrainian cities with Kalibr missiles. The blame game was in full swing as the aide accused Musk of ignorance and having an inflated ego, as if he were the one solely responsible for the ongoing tragedy.

Olexander Scherba, an official in Ukraine’s foreign ministry, said Musk was trying to “play god” by intervening.

In response to the backlash, Musk clarified that the Starlink regions in question were never activated, and SpaceX did not deactivate anything. He even went further, calling for a truce and emphasising the senselessness of the ongoing conflict. It seems Musk had the audacity to believe that the loss of innocent lives wasn’t worth gaining or losing small parcels of land with borders that barely change.

One can imagine the altars of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin shaking in rage at this affront. The priests of the war machine are frothing at the mouth, furious that a billionaire had the audacity to momentarily disrupt their bloodlust. Armchair generals across the Twitterverse screamed blue murder at the sheer impertinence.

But it’s rather amusing to see these neocon devotees turn on their capitalist idol so quickly.

It seems billionaires are only praised when they fuel the war effort, but dare question the rush to Armageddon and they’re immediately deemed villains. The Forever War mob really should make up their minds whether capitalists are virtuous disrupters or dastardly peacemongers.

How fickle these effusive ‘fans’ of free enterprise prove to be! They swoon over maverick capitalists right up until the moment their profit-driven pragmatism obstructs the liberal crusade for universal righteousness. Then it’s vilification and virtue-signalling all the way.

One minute they are lauding the billionaire Elon Musk as some sort of heroic champion of free speech and sticking it to the man. The next they are slamming him as an ignorant egoist for not allowing his Starlink satellites to be used in a reckless attack that could have sparked catastrophic escalation.

Appalled that a global business leader may not share their slavish devotion to maximal conflict only to maximum profit. This is the deranged logic of the ‘rules-based order’ at work again, where any restraint or hesitation to escalate is deemed complicity with evil.

In truth, Musk was quite right to be cautious. We’ve already seen how easily this crisis could spiral out of control. Does anyone sane really want billionaires freelancing foreign policy and triggering Russian retaliation? That’s a recipe for global disaster, no matter how angry it makes the laptop bombardiers.

Perhaps we should thank the billionaire for briefly restraining the baying mob. The idolaters of the war God Mars and Ukraine alike may wail at his prudence, but a nuclear exchange would make all his spaceships and satellites rather redundant. Though I doubt that will comfort the armchair generals in their quest for unlimited kinetic activity.

Meanwhile, the poor souls dying daily in the Donbas for the last nine years are mere statistics, their names and faces forgotten. The Neocons and the liberals alike, selectiveness over which lives matter is as blatant as their hypocrisy over meddlesome billionaires.

All of them are quite happy to risk World War Three in pursuit of geopolitical power games. And they call Elon Musk’s ego dangerous! Who’s really playing God?