Elon Musk’s hold over Ukraine is terrifying

Musk is a creature of early Silicon Valley and tech libertarianism goes to his bones. Picture: AFP

Elon Musk likes to get involved. You’ll remember, probably, the tiny, mad submarine that the world’s richest man built when those teenage boys got stuck in a Thai cave in 2018, only for one of the rescue divers to say it was a PR stunt and useless, and that Musk could “stick his submarine where it hurts”. In response, Musk called him “pedo guy” and the pair went to the libel courts. Dignified? No.

When Russia invaded Ukraine last year his help was far more welcome. After early attacks brought down Ukraine’s internet the deputy prime minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, used Twitter - which Musk did not yet own - to plead for access to Starlink, Musk’s satellite internet service. This was smart psychology, because Musk lives on Twitter and craves its users’ approval, and within a day he was proudly announcing that this would, indeed, be done.

Jauntily, Ukraine’s official Twitter account tweeted, “thanx, appreciate it” in response. And thus the online world’s very own superhero had shown that even in the face of murderous tyranny, the memes would not be stopped.

thanx, appreciate it https://t.co/OWm2Yu2WKC

— Ukraine / Україна (@Ukraine) February 26, 2022

Ukraine, though, did not just want to tweet cat videos. Beaming from space, via satellites run by Musk’s SpaceX, Starlink goes where cables cannot. Without it, the Ukrainian military would not have been able to operate many of the drones with which it has inflicted such damage on invading Russian forces.

Eventually, as confirmed in a new book by the biographer Walter Isaacson, Musk would go on to refuse the use of the service when Ukraine sought to target Russian boats in the Crimean port of Sevastopol. Submarine drones, writes Isaacson, lost connectivity and “washed ashore harmlessly”.

This is thorny. On the one hand, we might think it horrifying that Musk could do this, no matter the preferences of Kyiv or even the Pentagon. On the other, it’s down to him that Ukraine even had Starlink to start with. “If I had agreed to their request,” he has said since, “then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.”

Starlink is essential to the armed forces of Ukraine batteling Russian forces. Picture: Getty

In a sense, his dilemma was similar to that faced by all Ukrainian partners, about when or if to provide tanks or F-16 fighter jets, balancing support for Ukraine with a terror of whatever Russia might do in response. Those other partners, though, are countries. This one is an erratic billionaire who called one of his kids “X Æ A-12”.

Writing in The New Yorker, Ronan Farrow pointed out that Tesla, Musk’s car company, is heavily reliant on Chinese goodwill. Doubtless Beijing’s support for President Putin weighs heavily on his mind. It also seems likely, though, that he was simply frightened about the call he had to make. “How am I in this war?” he asked Isaacson. “Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars. It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school.”

At best, this is naive. Musk is a creature of early Silicon Valley and tech libertarianism goes to his bones. Whether he intellectualises it or not, his instincts stem from the same school of thought that led Peter Thiel to suggest founding extraterritorial cities on oil rigs, or Julian Assange to found Wikileaks. Or, if you prefer, that led to bitcoin. Starlink is explicitly designed to be unstoppable by governments on the ground, which is precisely why Russia can’t stop it. This makes it a brilliant weapon of war. Yet it is also why, when it’s yours, the buck stops with you.

Having initially provided Starlink to Ukraine at his own expense, Musk now has a contract with the Pentagon. It’s all very well saying that liberal powers, and especially the US, should have their own networks instead. Yet if Musk were a country, he’d be the 50th richest country on Earth. And no country, not even the US, has the GDP of New Zealand going spare to match him.

Worse still, Starlink doesn’t really have any competitors. Jeff Bezos of Amazon has plans but has not yet launched a single satellite. Musk already has more than 4,000. His closest functioning rival is a company called OneWeb, with a few hundred. Ironically, OneWeb ran into difficulties last year because it had been working with the Russian space agency. Some future launches, instead, are likely to rely on Musk’s own SpaceX.

As one Pentagon defence chief told Farrow: “Even though Musk is not technically a diplomat or statesman, I felt it was important to treat him as such.” Obviously, this is not the first time that a wealthy individual has had a role in a war. Yet when world wars were fought with the help of industrialists, at least other industrialists were available. One thinks of the role of oligarchs in Russia itself, and particularly of the Wagner group, through which private capital and hazy lines of responsibility were exploited to advance national interests. Existing at the whim of tyranny, though, an uppity oligarch always runs the risk of, say, mysteriously blowing up in mid-air. Musk is not in this situation. Or at least, not unless he gets on one of his own rockets.

For years now, some have raised the alarm at the immense power wielded by tech firms via social media. Until recently many would have thought this the core concern about Musk himself, after his wild and capricious takeover of Twitter. Compared with Starlink, though, such worries feel flippant. Given the future challenges of artificial intelligence - a technology that Musk himself worries may pose an existential risk to humanity - tech power is only going to grow. Who knows what future Oppenheimers that could spawn?

One might think “rein it in” but China isn’t reining it in, and reining in Musk would have precluded Ukraine getting Starlink in the first place. Even he, though, seems frankly terrified that huge decisions about life, death and geopolitical conflict have ended up in his woefully unqualified hands. We should be, too.