Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule

In the past twenty years, against a backdrop of crumbling infrastructure and declining trust in institutions, Musk has sought out business opportunities in crucial areas where, after decades of privatization, the state has receded. The government is now reliant on him, but struggles to respond to his risk-taking, brinkmanship, and caprice.

Musk was asked whether he has more influence than the American government. He replied immediately, “In some ways.”

“We are living off his good graces,” a Pentagon official said of Musk’s role in the war in Ukraine. “That sucks.”

How the U.S. government came to rely on the tech billionaire—and is now struggling to rein him in.

New Yorker, By Ronan Farrow, August 21, 2023

Last October, Colin Kahl, then the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy at the Pentagon, sat in a hotel in Paris and prepared to make a call to avert disaster in Ukraine. A staffer handed him an iPhone—in part to avoid inviting an onslaught of late-night texts and colorful emojis on Kahl’s own phone. Kahl had returned to his room, with its heavy drapery and distant view of the Eiffel Tower, after a day of meetings with officials from the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. A senior defense official told me that Kahl was surprised by whom he was about to contact: “He was, like, ‘Why am I calling Elon Musk?’ ”

The reason soon became apparent. “Even though Musk is not technically a diplomat or statesman, I felt it was important to treat him as such, given the influence he had on this issue,” Kahl told me. SpaceX, Musk’s space-exploration company, had for months been providing Internet access across Ukraine, allowing the country’s forces to plan attacks and to defend themselves. But, in recent days, the forces had found their connectivity severed as they entered territory contested by Russia.

More alarmingly, SpaceX had recently given the Pentagon an ultimatum: if it didn’t assume the cost of providing service in Ukraine, which the company calculated at some four hundred million dollars annually, it would cut off access. “We started to get a little panicked,” the senior defense official, one of four who described the standoff to me, recalled. Musk “could turn it off at any given moment. And that would have real operational impact for the Ukrainians.”

Musk had become involved in the war in Ukraine soon after Russia invaded, in February, 2022. Along with conventional assaults, the Kremlin was conducting cyberattacks against Ukraine’s digital infrastructure. Ukrainian officials and a loose coalition of expatriates in the tech sector, brainstorming in group chats on WhatsApp and Signal, found a potential solution: SpaceX, which manufactures a line of mobile Internet terminals called Starlink. The tripod-mounted dishes, each about the size of a computer display and clad in white plastic reminiscent of the sleek design sensibility of Musk’s Tesla electric cars, connect with a network of satellites. 

The units have limited range, but in this situation that was an advantage: although a nationwide network of dishes was required, it would be difficult for Russia to completely dismantle Ukrainian connectivity. Of course, Musk could do so. Three people involved in bringing Starlink to Ukraine, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they worried that Musk, if upset, could withdraw his services, told me that they originally overlooked the significance of his personal control. “Nobody thought about it back then,” one of them, a Ukrainian tech executive, told me. “It was all about ‘Let’s fucking go, people are dying.’ ”

In the ensuing months, fund-raising in Silicon Valley’s Ukrainian community, contracts with the U.S. Agency for International Development and with European governments, and pro-bono contributions from SpaceX facilitated the transfer of thousands of Starlink units to Ukraine. A soldier in Ukraine’s signal corps who was responsible for maintaining Starlink access on the front lines, and who asked to be identified only by his first name, Mykola, told me, “It’s the essential backbone of communication on the battlefield.”

Initially, Musk showed unreserved support for the Ukrainian cause, responding encouragingly as Mykhailo Fedorov, the Ukrainian minister for digital transformation, tweeted pictures of equipment in the field. But, as the war ground on, SpaceX began to balk at the cost. “We are not in a position to further donate terminals to Ukraine, or fund the existing terminals for an indefinite period of time,” SpaceX’s director of government sales told the Pentagon in a letter, last September. (CNBC recently valued SpaceX at nearly a hundred and fifty billion dollars. Forbes estimated Musk’s personal net worth at two hundred and twenty billion dollars, making him the world’s richest man.)

Musk was also growing increasingly uneasy with the fact that his technology was being used for warfare. That month, at a conference in Aspen attended by business and political figures, Musk even appeared to express support for Vladimir Putin. “He was onstage, and he said, ‘We should be negotiating. Putin wants peace—we should be negotiating peace with Putin,’ ” Reid Hoffman, who helped start PayPal with Musk, recalled. Musk seemed, he said, to have “bought what Putin was selling, hook, line, and sinker.” A week later, Musk tweeted a proposal for his own peace plan, which called for new referendums to redraw the borders of Ukraine, and granted Russia control of Crimea, the semi-autonomous peninsula recognized by most nations, including the United States, as Ukrainian territory. In later tweets, Musk portrayed as inevitable an outcome favoring Russia and attached maps highlighting eastern Ukrainian territories, some of which, he argued, “prefer Russia.” Musk also polled his Twitter followers about the plan. Millions responded, with about sixty per cent rejecting the proposal. (Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s President, tweeted his own poll, asking users whether they preferred the Elon Musk who supported Ukraine or the one who now seemed to back Russia. The former won, though Zelensky’s poll had a smaller turnout: Musk has more than twenty times as many followers.)

……… . One day, Ukrainian forces advancing into contested areas in the south found themselves suddenly unable to communicate…………………………………….. . The Financial Times reported that outages affected units in Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, Donetsk, and Luhansk. American and Ukrainian officials told me they believed that SpaceX had cut the connectivity via geofencing, cordoning off areas of access.

The senior defense official said, “We had a whole series of meetings internal to the department to try to figure out what we could do about this.” Musk’s singular role presented unfamiliar challenges, as did the government’s role as intermediary……………… The Pentagon would need to reach a contractual arrangement with SpaceX so that, at the very least, Musk “couldn’t wake up one morning and just decide, like, he didn’t want to do this anymore.” 

……………… To the dismay of Pentagon officials, Musk volunteered that he had spoken with Putin personally. Another individual told me that Musk had made the same assertion in the weeks before he tweeted his pro-Russia peace plan, and had said that his consultations with the Kremlin were regular……………. On the phone, Musk said that he was looking at his laptop and could see “the entire war unfolding” through a map of Starlink activity. ………….Musk told Kahl that the vivid illustration of how technology he had designed for peaceful ends was being used to wage war gave him pause.

After a fifteen-minute call, Musk agreed to give the Pentagon more time. He also, after public blowback and with evident annoyance, walked back his threats to cut off service. “The hell with it,” he tweeted. “Even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free.” This June, the Department of Defense announced that it had reached a deal with SpaceX.

The meddling of oligarchs and other monied interests in the fate of nations is not new.……………………………….

But Musk’s influence is more brazen and expansive. There is little precedent for a civilian’s becoming the arbiter of a war between nations in such a granular way, or for the degree of dependency that the U.S. now has on Musk in a variety of fields, from the future of energy and transportation to the exploration of space. SpaceX is currently the sole means by which nasa transports crew from U.S. soil into space, a situation that will persist for at least another year. The government’s plan to move the auto industry toward electric cars requires increasing access to charging stations along America’s highways. But this rests on the actions of another Musk enterprise, Tesla. The automaker has seeded so much of the country with its proprietary charging stations that the Biden Administration relaxed an early push for a universal charging standard disliked by Musk. His stations are eligible for billions of dollars in subsidies, so long as Tesla makes them compatible with the other charging standard.

In the past twenty years, against a backdrop of crumbling infrastructure and declining trust in institutions, Musk has sought out business opportunities in crucial areas where, after decades of privatization, the state has receded. The government is now reliant on him, but struggles to respond to his risk-taking, brinkmanship, and caprice.

Current and former officials from nasa, the Department of Defense, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration told me that Musk’s influence had become inescapable in their work, and several of them said that they now treat him like a sort of unelected official. One Pentagon spokesman said that he was keeping Musk apprised of my inquiries about his role in Ukraine and would grant an interview with an official about the matter only with Musk’s permission. “We’ll talk to you if Elon wants us to,” he told me. In a podcast interview last year, Musk was asked whether he has more influence than the American government. He replied immediately, “In some ways.” Reid Hoffman told me that Musk’s attitude is “like Louis XIV: ‘L’état, c’est moi.’ ”

Musk’s power continues to grow. His takeover of Twitter, which he has rebranded “X,” gives him a critical forum for political discourse ahead of the next Presidential election. He recently launched an artificial-intelligence company, a move that follows years of involvement in the technology. Musk has become a hyper-exposed pop-culture figure, and his sharp turns from altruistic to vainglorious, strategic to impulsive, have been the subject of innumerable articles and at least seven major books, including a forthcoming biography by Walter Isaacson. But the nature and the scope of his power are less widely understood.

More than thirty of Musk’s current and former colleagues in various industries and a dozen individuals in his personal life spoke to me about their experiences with him. Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, with whom Musk has both worked and sparred, told me, “Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it.”

…………………………………………………..officials expressed profound misgivings. “Living in the world we live in, in which Elon runs this company and it is a private business under his control, we are living off his good graces,” a Pentagon official told me. “That sucks.”

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………Of all Musk’s enterprises, SpaceX may be the one that most fundamentally reflects his appetite for risk…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. “He has a long history of launching and blowing up rockets. And then he puts out videos of all the rockets that he’s blown up. And like half of America thinks it’s really cool,” the former nasa administrator Jim Bridenstine told me. “He has a different set of rules.”

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. There are competitors in the field, including Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, but none yet rival SpaceX. The new space race has the potential to shape the global balance of power. Satellites enable the navigation of drones and missiles and generate imagery used for intelligence, and they are mostly under the control of private companies…………………………………

Several officials told me that they were alarmed by nasa’s reliance on SpaceX for essential services. “There is only one thing worse than a government monopoly. And that is a private monopoly that the government is dependent on,” Bridenstine said. “I do worry that we have put all of our eggs into one basket, and it’s the SpaceX basket.”

………………………………………………………………………………………………………. Officials who have worked at osha and at an equivalent California agency told me that Musk’s influence, and his attitude about regulation, had made their jobs difficult…………………………………………………………………………………. You add on the fact that he considers himself to be a master of the universe and these rules just don’t apply to people like him,” Jordan Barab, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor at osha, told me. “There’s a lot of underreporting in industry in general. And Elon Musk kind of seems to raise that to an art form.”  Garrett Brown, a former field-compliance inspector at California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health, added, “We have a bad health-and-safety situation throughout the country. And it’s worse in companies run by people like Elon Musk, who was ideologically opposed to the idea of government enforcement of public-health regulations.”

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. On July 12th, Musk announced xAI, his entry into a field that promises to alter much about life as we know it. He tweeted an image of the new company’s Web site, featuring a characteristically theatrical mission statement: the firm’s goal, he said, was “to understand the true nature of the universe.”

……………………………………………………… Musk has been involved in artificial intelligence for years. In 2015, he was one of a handful of tech leaders, including Hoffman and Thiel, who funded OpenAI, then a nonprofit initiative. (It now has a for-profit subsidiary.)…………………………………………………  Musk left the company in 2018, reneging on a commitment to further fund OpenAI…………………………….  a lot of my life and time to make sure we had enough funding.” OpenAI went on to become a leader in the field, introducing ChatGPT last year. Musk has made a habit of trashing the company, 

……………………..It is difficult to say whether Musk’s interest in A.I. is driven by scientific wonder and altruism or by a desire to dominate a new and potentially powerful industry.

……………………….. In March, Musk, along with dozens of tech leaders, signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause in the development of advanced A.I. technology……………………. Yet in the period during which Musk endorsed a pause, he was working to build xAI, recruiting from major competitors, including OpenAI, and even, according to someone with knowledge of the conversation, contacting leadership at Nvidia, the dominant maker of chips used in A.I. The month the letter was distributed, Musk completed the registrations for xAI.

…………… “His whole approach to A.I. is: A.I. can only be saved if I deliver, if I build it.” …………………………………. more https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/28/elon-musks-shadow-rule#:~:text=How%20the%20U.S.%20government%20came,struggling%20to%20rein%20him%20in.&text=Last%20October%2C%20Colin%20Kahl%2C%20then,to%20avert%20disaster%20in%20Ukraine.–

August 28, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Space agency NASA and bro billionaires conspire to trash the moon

Two days before the Lockheed Martin news broke, NASA had announced a literally lunatic plan to trash the Moon with nuclear waste. It’s as if our species has learned nothing at all after ruining our own planet to the point of extinction as a livable organism.

We are arming the heavens

NASA joins the lunatic fringe, By Linda Pentz Gunter,  https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2023/08/27/nasa-joins-the-lunatic-fringe/

Russia just crash-landed on the moon. India’s lunar rover is trundling across its surface. Are their intentions purely benign? Just about science? Or something more?

There are no such doubts lingering over US lunar plans, however. The mistakes made on Planet Earth will now be repeated on the moon.

In his fascinating and frightening 2012 book — A Short History of Nuclear Folly — that I somehow maddeningly missed on publication, Rudolph Herzog writes:

“There are places where radioactive substances have no business being. One of them is space.”

Herzog, son of the famous film director Werner, and whose book, written in German, was translated into English in 2013, details a whole panoply of terrifying nuclear accidents and near-misses, including disasters that could have befallen us in and from space.

But no lessons have been learned and no such warnings heeded.

Consequently, we now learn that NASA and the US Defense Department have awarded nuclear weapons company, Lockheed Martin, a contract to build a nuclear powered rocket to speed humans on their way to Mars. 

“Higher thrust propulsion” is what Lockheed Martin is seeking to develop, but is travel speed to Mars really the only motivation? Of course not. The Pentagon admits it is also keen to develop nuclear reactor technology that will power satellites with more “fuel-efficient fuel sources” so that they can maneuver in space in such a way as to “make them more difficult for adversaries to target” reported the Washington Post.

As Herzog recounts in his book, we have been here before, and the outcome could have been catastrophic. In his chapter, Flying Reactors, he recounts how in the 1960s, the then Soviet Union developed miniature nuclear reactors to power their RORSAT military surveillance satellites. At the end of their life they were simply blasted into deeper space where their radioactive load would decay far from human exposure risk. Or, at least, that is what was supposed to happen.

Needless to say, eventually one of the Soviet reactor-powered satellites failed to follow orders and instead began plummeting toward Earth. The Soviets warned the US it could crash in North America on January 24, 1978. 

Panicked headlines ensued as the media began to speculate on worst case scenario crash landing locations. As Herzog relates, “Time magazine calculated that if the satellite had orbited the Earth one more time it could have crashed in New York City in rush hour.”

Instead, luck prevailed, although not for northwestern Canada where it eventually reached Earth in the middle of the Arctic winter, prompting a challenging and month-long search party to find it and clean up the “mess”.

Despite this, the Soviets continued right on and lost several more of these Cosmos satellites, although none, apparently, crashed on land.

Two days before the Lockheed Martin news broke, NASA had announced a literally lunatic plan to trash the Moon with nuclear waste. It’s as if our species has learned nothing at all after ruining our own planet to the point of extinction as a livable organism.

A total of $150 million in contracts are to be awarded by NASA to “build landing pads, roads and habitats on the lunar surface, use nuclear power for energy, and even lay a high-voltage power line,” reported the Washington Post.

Yes, the USA is going to pave the moon and put up a parking lot.

The endgame is to allow human beings to live on the moon for extended periods of time. And to contaminate it with nuclear waste while they’re about it. And to dig it up and pave it over and, most absurdly, to “Iive off the land” as one NASA administrator put it.

That means implementing an extractive industry to mine the moon for construction materials such as metals, as well as to find water. And, presumably, to dispose of all the waste on other parts of the moon not targeted for human living spaces.

A major recipient of NASA’s lunatic largesse was, needless to say, one of the bro billionaires who are already heavily invested in the futile and expensive space odyssey that will eventually allow human habitation on the moon and Mars (presumably for a handful of other bro billionaires and their cronies.) So Amazon and Washington Post owner, Jeff Bezos, is first in line for a $43.7 million handout to support these goals.

Solar arrays for the moon are also in the offing, but this does little to nullify the awful prospect of the moon turning into Thneed-Ville (see Dr. Seuss’s seminal book on industrial destruction, The Lorax).

As these latest NASA announcements reveal, without actually spelling it out, the agenda here goes well beyond the thrill of human space exploration. We are arming the heavens and that, as Herzog points out, can only go badly.

The madness of nuclear power and nuclear weapons in space has been well documented in War in Heaven: The Arms Race in Outer Space by Helen Caldicott and Craig Eisendrath and The Wrong Stuff: The Space Program’s Nuclear Threat to Our Planet, by Karl Grossman.We also examine the more sinister agenda behind all this in the Beyond Nuclear Handbook — The U.S. Space Force and the dangers of nuclear power and nuclear war in space.

But there is also another question: What gives the United States the right to decide, unilaterally, that it will colonize the moon and Mars? When did the US annex these celestial territories? Human beings have for centuries waxed lyrical and poetic about the moon as it shines down on us with its magical and ethereal glow. But do any of us own it? Surely it belongs in the commons and we, as a collective species, should decide whether or not it can be plundered and desecrated by one country alone, or, preferably, not at all?

Ironically, after all the sci-fi fantasies about evil Martians invading Planet Earth, it turns out that it is we humans who are about to invade Mars and the moon, bringing our heedless and destructive ways with us. And all this, while we leave a spectacularly beautiful planet behind us to decay and degenerate as a result of our selfish greed.

August 28, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Ukraine’s Counteroffensive Has Failed—It’s Time to Reevaluate.

What makes all of this vastly worse is that the cost to Ukrainians in their lives is staggeringly high. Consider just this one harrowing data point: more Ukrainian soldiers have been killed in the first 18 months of this war than the number of American soldiers killed during the decade-plus war in Vietnam.

August 26, 2023 By Glenn Greenwald ,https://scheerpost.com/2023/08/26/ukraines-counteroffensive-has-failed-its-time-to-reevaluate/—

There is no question that the war in Ukraine has radically changed. Even Western media outlets that have been steadfastly cheerleading for this war – and, indeed, even Ukrainians themselves – are now admitting what battlefield realities dispositively prove. The much-vaunted Ukrainian counter-offensive – the imminent dramatic event we were assured for months would be transformative in finally giving Ukraine the upper hand and dislodging entrenched Russian positions inside Ukraine: a claim that doubled as a propaganda tool to assuage a growingly restless Western population about their endless support for this war – is now, no matter how you slice it, a failure. 

After months of multi-pronged attacks, Ukraine’s gains are so minimal and trivial as to be barely worth noting. Russia continues to occupy a very significant chunk of both Eastern and southern Ukraine, along with Crimea which they have held since 2014. Even Western intelligence reports acknowledge that the Russians’ defensive positions are more fortified and entrenched than any seen in decades. The U.S. has already depleted its own stockpiles of artillery and other vital weapons and simply does not have to give Ukraine what they need to have any hope of changing this situation in anything resembling the near- or the short-term future.

What makes all of this vastly worse is that the cost to Ukrainians in their lives is staggeringly high. Consider just this one harrowing data point: more Ukrainian soldiers have been killed in the first 18 months of this war than the number of American soldiers killed during the decade-plus war in Vietnam. The Ukrainian men who were eager to fight and who volunteered to do so have long ago been used up – killed, maimed, or exhausted. Zelensky’s only option for continuing combat is to increase domestic repression, impose greater and greater punishment for desertion, and use harsher and harsher means to force those unwilling to fight to do so against their will. In so many ways, this conflict resembles some of the worst horrors of World War I, including the need to put unwilling men who do not want to fight the deeply grim choice of either offering themselves up as cannon fodder or facing unimaginably harsh punishments by a government completely unconstrained by basic considerations of human rights or legal process, operating under full-scale martial law.

At this point, debates over who is to blame for this war barely matter. All that does matter is the question of how this will end, and who will end it. It is simply becoming unsustainable – politically, economically, and morally – to justify having Western nations pour their resources into fueling and continuing this war that Ukraine has less and less chance of winning. At the start of the war, many who claim that the real goal of the US was not to save Ukraine and Ukrainians but rather to destroy them – at the altar of their geostrategic goal of weakening Russia – were accused of being callous and conspiratorial. Now, there is little reasonable space to contest that they were right all along.

Joe Biden just asked for another $25 billion to keep this war going – as he offered $700 checks per household to the victims of the Maui fire and as profits for the European arms industry reach such record heights that they do not even bother to conceal their glee. Even if you were someone who supported the US role in Ukraine back in February of 2022 with the best of intentions – namely, you wanted to help a country seeing to avoid Russian domination – the failed nature of this mission has to compel a re-evaluation of perspective and policy. The last thing this war is doing is protecting Ukraine and Ukrainians. It is destroying both of those while imposing suffering among everyone in the U.S. and Western countries other than a tiny sliver of arms dealers and intelligence agencies. In other words, the war in Ukraine is following exactly the same pattern as every other U.S. war fought over the last 50 years.

August 28, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment