Not exactly a name you want associated with anything to do with national security right now.
Things that tend to matter a lot in that world are credibility, stability and reliability.
New information has come in via a very public set of car crashes and that relationship is now looking like a liability.
The owner with an 80% voting control of the company has had some very serious issues in judgement lately not limited to the Twitter fiasco but has also made a number of public moves that were very friendly towards what the US has called their biggest national security threat repeatedly for the past half decade or longer.
In a national security context that would be generally thought of as a completely unacceptable amount of leverage for your main enemy to have over your national security infrastructure.
This isn’t some mindless Elon bashing post, I’m presenting this as an actual honest to god problem for natsec.
Translation: "I think you're committing wrongthink to be asking such a question, but I'll magnanimously say 'let's operate on good faith'".
>The owner with an 80% voting control of the company has had some very serious issues in judgement lately not limited to the Twitter fiasco
Ah yes, the world's wealthiest man has invested 20% of his net wealth in something that may or may not work out. Proof that he is a danger to national security!!!1!!11!!!!!
PS - Two questions to ponder:
Q: Wasn't Twitter supposed to have collapsed and died like a month ago? A: Yes.
Q: Isn't Twitter functioning apparently quite well during the current mega world event known as the FIFA World Cup? A: Yes.
>but has also made a number of public moves that were very friendly towards what the US has called their biggest national security threat repeatedly for the past half decade or longer.
Oh, good grief. Musk said that Ukraine might have to give up land to end the war with Russia. A) A negotiated settlement is how 90% of wars in world history have ended, and B) such a settlement has always been the most likely scenario for ending the current war. Maybe it'll be a formal recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea, maybe it'll also include parts of eastern Ukraine.
Now, maybe Ukraine's recent successes on the ground will let it regain control over all of its territory, maybe even Crimea. I hope that happens, but (again, even with the recent pushback of Russian lines) that still remains a relatively unlikely outcome.
>This isn’t some mindless Elon bashing post, I’m presenting this as an actual honest to god problem for natsec.
There is nothing wrong, from a legal or moral perspective, in Musk publicly stating what he said. He is an American and the US is not actually a combatant in the war. Musk is free to say anything he wants, and those who immediately claim that anything short of demanding "Ukrainian forces roll into Moscow and Zelensky personally swings the axe that cuts off Putin's head" = Russian sympathizer/"problem with natsec" just make themselves look stupid.
But I think if Musk were to die in a mysterious Tesla fire tomorrow, not much would change for the worse at the company for quite some time.
Eg. Falcon Heavy was almost cancelled because the engineering side turned out to make it more expensive to develop than expected (with the original plan for fuel crossfeed) and F9 had improved so much that it ate up most of FH's potential market. So Musk's preference was to cancel it. But because it was favorable for the business side (I think they might've even already bid on some launches with it by then), Shotwell pushed for them to keep it, which is how we got the current variation of FH which just has F9s with a reinforced center-core.
Musk has since cratered his, but Shotwell's is intact.
But your theory has some merit since the timing of the Falcon project's award to SpaceX could be coming about the same time that they named the rocket.
Both theories may be right. The Falcon project grew out of the Reagan era Star Wars project, so it's likely a backronym.
Dig deeper and the story only gets more interesting.