What an utter piece of shit.

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69 points

He did this with federal funds. And the US hasn’t declared war since, what, WW2? The Rosenbergs were executed for treason, and we never declared war with USSR.

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50 points

The Rosenbergs were executed for treason

Espionage, actually.

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3 points
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I don’t know the legal definition of espionage but sure as hell seems like elons loyalty lies outside of the US.

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1 point

Elon’s loyalty lies with Elon. It’s never been otherwise.

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23 points
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The Rosenbergs were convicted on espionage charges. They were sending classified info to the USSR. That’s different from treason although it’s related. The funding angle is an interesting question though. It still wouldn’t be treason, but it could qualify as… breach of contract maybe? Not sure exactly what the charge is when the government pays you for a service and you don’t fullfill the service in a satisfactory manner.

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6 points

Would this not be espionage? Or would he have to have been acting under the direction of a state actor?

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7 points

Espionage would require providing confidential intel to a foreign power. As far as I’m aware he didn’t share any intel, merely disabled the internet service he was providing within key areas. Even then, leaking Unkranian intel to Russia while arguably espionage against Ukraine would likely not qualify. He would need to provide confidential US material to Russia (or another foreign power) for it to be espionage.

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2 points

He did not actually do it with federal funds. These were donated Starlink terminals and service was paid for by SpaceX.

That’s the whole point, the US government allowed civilian technology to be used in war by a foreign government.

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1 point

He did this with federal funds

Apparently this was before he got federal funds.

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2 points

Didn’t he get subsidies for spaceX and Tesla?

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1 point
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Tesla got some preferential loans in 2010, it paid them off by 2013. Now it benefits from buyers of any brand electric car getting subsidies… so, “kind of”?

SpaceX got government contracts for specific services… which could have been inflated or not, but didn’t include Starlink (at least not officially).

This is different from direct subsidies like those given to Boeing, which also gets inflated contracts (see NASA’s SLS), but in addition gets preferential tax discounts and lowered export taxes.

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-11 points

Uh… People from Vietnam, Korea, and Afganistan would like to differ. (not an exclusive list).

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12 points

“Declared”

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8 points

Ok! They’d be objectively wrong, but yeah, differ away!

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4 points

Although a bit irrelevant to the discussion about treason, I had to giggle at the WW2 bit. A simpler statistic would be when the US was not at war.

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15 points

It’s mostly a semantics game. The US is involved in military conflicts all the time, but those are not officially “wars”, since the US going to war requires Congress to officially declare it. Therefore anytime the US was involved in a military conflict, but Congress did not issue a formal declaration of war, the US was not technically at war. He is correct in that the last time that Congress formally declared war was WW2.

However, all that said, that’s just silly semantic games, everyone understands that if the US deploys military forces against another nations military forces that is in fact war, and on that metric the US has had many wars since WW2.

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