“If it involves money. It’ll be on our platform. Money or securities or whatever. So, it’s not just like send $20 to my friend. I’m talking about, like, you won’t need a bank account.”
Well that sounds terrifying!
Isaacson writes that Musk reportedly panicked when he heard about the planned Ukrainian attack, which was using Starlink satellites to guide six drones packed with explosives towards the Crimea coast.
After speaking to the Russian ambassador to the United States — who reportedly told him an attack on Crimea would trigger a nuclear response — Musk took matters into his own hands and ordered his engineers to turn off Starlink coverage “within 100 kilometers of the Crimean coast.”
This caused the drones to lose connectivity and wash “ashore harmlessly,” effectively sabotaging the offensive mission.
Ukraine’s reaction was immediate: Officials frantically called Musk and asked him to turn the service back on, telling him that the “drone subs were crucial to their fight for freedom.”
They had access. Musk revoked it from the Crimea region after the fact.
No they didn’t
Isaacson, the biographer, issued his own clarification on Sept. 8, acknowledging that Starlink was not enabled in Crimea in the first place:
To clarify on the Starlink issue: the Ukrainians THOUGHT coverage was enabled all the way to Crimea, but it was not. They asked Musk to enable it for their drone sub attack on the Russian fleet. Musk did not enable it, because he thought, probably correctly, that would cause a major war.
