While I happen to agree with the goal of pushing Putin out of Ukraine, can I blame a private individual for not wanting to take that step.
Musk is a private individual, and Starlink is a private company. They are not in business to fight wars.
Edit: To be clear, in this instance, it isn't "Elon Bad!" It's that no one person should be able to wield nation state power without all of the governance that goes with a nation state.
What's more puzzling is that he thought that he thought he could dabble in geopolitics and matters of war and come away cleanly.
Thank God private individuals and private companies don't fight wars. It is difficult to imagine a world where that happens.
FTA: “Elon Musk secretly ordered his engineers to disable Starlink satellite communications near the coast of Russian-occupied Crimea last year to sabotage a planned Ukrainian drone strike”
I don’t think both of those can be the full truth, and am inclined to give Walter Isaacson’s claim (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/09/07/elon-musk...: “Allowing the use of Starlink for the attack, he concluded, could be a disaster for the world. So he secretly told his engineers to turn off coverage within 100 kilometers of the Crimean coast”) more value, but that’s a gut feeling, not one based on facts.
> Musk is a private individual, and Starlink is a private company. They are not in business to fight wars.
That’s true, but nevertheless, they can’t avoid being in a war. They can’t close their eyes and ignore that war. Even not doing anything is a choice.
Other subject: what would you do if you were one of those engineers being ordered to disable Starlink?