Last year, Elon Musk secretly ordered his engineers to shut down the Starlink satellite communications network off the coast of Crimea to thwart a Ukrainian attack on the Russian navy. This is stated in an excerpt from a new biography of the billionaire, writes CNN.
The author of the book Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson, claims that when Ukrainian naval attack drones, loaded with explosives, approached the Russian fleet, they lost communication and were washed ashore.
Ukrainian officials begged the billionaire to reconnect the satellite network. But his decision was motivated by the fear that Russia would respond to the Ukrainian attack on Crimea with nuclear weapons. This fear was provoked by the billionaire’s conversations with high-ranking Russian officials.
As you know, the Starlink satellite Internet service was launched in Ukraine last year and played an important role at the beginning of the full-scale war. But as soon as Ukraine started using Starlink to launch offensive attacks against Russia, Elon Musk began to doubt his decision.
“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,” the biographer paraphrases the billionaire’s words.
Recently, The New Yorker published information that due to Elon Musk’s sympathies, SpaceX blocked the work of Starlink for the Ukrainian military. The Financial Times reported that the outage affected units in Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, Donetsk, and Luhansk. U.S. and Ukrainian officials believe that SpaceX interrupted communications through geofencing, limiting access areas.
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