Elon Musk does not cause sympathy in people, among other things, because of his unbearable arrogance, but there is no doubt that he is a smart man who is able to combine big business sense with geopolitics.
That’s why the South African businessman rejected Kiev’s request to reactivate its Starlink satellite network to allow connectivity on the Crimean peninsula, despite having supported Ukraine from the beginning in its military conflict with Russia.
The Kiev Government had planned an attack on Sevastopol, the main base of the Russian fleet in the Black Sea, with explosive-laden underwater unmanned aerial vehicles, and for this it was necessary to connect to the Starlink navigation system.
However, the founder of SpaceX and the owner of Twitter did not want to be so involved in the escalation of the conflict, which was constantly fueled by the shipment of NATO weapons to the occupied country.
In fact, from the very beginning of the Ukrainian war, Musk took the side of this country, as Kiev urgently requested, sending thousands of Starlink terminals that serve to coordinate military operations against the Russian invader and maintain constant communication with Ukraine. Americans.
Some of these terminals were gifts from the company, others were funded by agencies of various Western governments and private sponsors, including British conservative historian Niall Ferguson or Marc Benioff, billionaire and CEO of Salesforce.
But when the Ukrainians asked Musk to reactivate the network in Crimea to direct several explosive-laden underwater drones to their targets on the annexed peninsula, the businessman thought that what Kiev was preparing was something reckless that could have disastrous consequences for the entire region. humanity.
According to journalistic reports, the businessman met with the Russian ambassador to the USA, and the ambassador warned him about something that the Kremlin has warned many times: Russia will respond with nuclear weapons to a possible attack on Crimea.
Historian Walter Isaacson from the Washington Post says that after this conversation, Musk secretly ordered his engineers to cut off satellite coverage a hundred kilometers away from the Crimean coast, so as they approached Sevastopol, the drones lost connection and could not fulfill their assigned mission. duty.
So, is the richest man in the world as altruistic as he implies, or does this gesture, which should undoubtedly be welcomed, also have an economic purpose?
Perhaps the businessman calculated that Russia could take revenge and destroy the satellite network in that part of Europe. That would destroy the business he had in the rest of Ukraine. After all, Starlink is a private company, so Moscow doesn’t need to be as careful when attacking one of its satellites as if it were state property of a NATO country.
But some German journalists compared Musk’s anyway cautious gesture with the aggression that the Greens continue to show in the Berlin Government, who have not stopped pressuring Chancellor Olaf Scholz to allow the missiles to be sent to Ukraine. Reaching Russian territory.