Elon Musk. Hmmm.

I like long form essays about current issues, and having discovered interesting things to read in the Jewish Quarterly lent to me by a friend, I succumbed to subscribing to this journal when they made the decision to change to long form essays. The first one to arrive in my letter box was Dark Star, Elon Musk's Dangerous Turn by award winning author, reporter and screenwriter, Richard Cooke.

His website tells me that Cooke is:

The author of two books, Tired of Winning, A Chronicle of American Decline, (which has a picture of That Dreadful Man on the cover) and a work of literary criticism in the Black Inc series on Australian writers: On Robyn Davidson. He's also the former US correspondent and current contributing editor to the The Monthly magazine, the former sports editor of The Saturday Paper, and the former arts editor of Time Out Sydney. For a time he edited The Chaser newspaper, and has been published in the Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Republic, WIRED and the Paris Review.

In other words, his interests range far and wide. He's certainly a compelling writer: what he has to say about Elon Musk and his ambitions sent a chill down my spine...

He has a habit of inserting himself into major events to which he has little connection. (p.19)

We in Australia certainly remember how he tried to intervene in the rescue of those Thai schoolboys trapped in a flooded cave in 2018, offering to design a submarine to rescue them and insulting the leader of the rescue operation in a disgraceful way. But that is not the least of it. Other interventions have been much more alarming, with real world effects...

In the early phase of the war in Ukraine, Musk responded to a personal appeal from the Ukrainian vice prime minister by enabling the Starlink electronic system to replace the damaged telecommunications infrastructure within 24 hours of being asked to do it.

It was significant, and canny, that Fedorov made his appeal in public, but not everyone was impressed. 'In that moment, Elon Musk, the man, seemed to be acting almost like a state of his own, a foreign entity that people around the world can call on for humanitarian aid in the way they might call on a government,' Marina Koren wrote in The Atlantic, before offering some comfort. Musk's 'outsize reputation', she assured readers, 'doesn't always match what he can actually control.' Internally at SpaceX, the company's president Gwynne Shotwell, argued that the private subsidy of the Ukrainian war effort was a mistake. She was negotiating a US$145 million contract with the Pentagon, which would fund Starlink on behalf of the Ukrainians, and was exasperated when Musk decided to continue on regardless. (p.20)

And then [as if Musk were a grown-up kid role-playing the computer game Civilisation], it was revealed that he had placed limitations on the technology which actually affected military operations. When the Ukrainians protested, Musk told them that 'Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars. It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good peaceful things, not drone strikes.' (p.21)

Whatever the rights and wrongs of that or any war, it creates more than an uneasy feeling when a lone individual with massive wealth who does not hold public office can make decisions like that, eh?

Some called it treason. Musk was, they said, undermining the US State Department's policy on Ukraine. Others attacked the lack of wisdom that had granted him these powers in the first place. Other European militaries began an urgent search for a Starlink alternative so as not to find themselves in the same position. [...]

Musk's own admission — that Starlink had been geofenced for the whole war — had serious implications. It meant Musk could not only end the advance of a foreign military with a word, but also set the shape of that advance beforehand, making hard boundaries for the conflict, by himself and in secret. Few individuals have been so central to a war effort since the duelling atomic physicists of World War II. Whatever was happening on the ground, Musk controlled the upper limits of the sky above it. (p.22)

Belatedly, US officials began to complain about American dependency on Musk, ranging from the future of energy and transportation to the exploration of space.

They mentioned that Musk also controls the largest nationwide network of electric vehicle chargers in the United States, making him critical to the future rollout of EVs, whether they are Teslas or not. (p.23)

[There are now four EVs on my route round the block with Amber, three of them Teslas. They charge up at home from rooftop solar with storage batteries. They'd be Tesla too.]

And while Ukraine was calling on Elon Musk, Elon Musk was calling for advice from his Twitter followers, and the one who suggested taking Starlink offline to de-escalate the war was a Malaysia-based political commentator called Ian Miles Cheong, whose massive audience consists of American conservatives.

For centuries, diplomacy rested on carefully attuned language. Diplomats were expected to be shrewd and wise, schooled in history and languages. It goes almost without saying that a sh__-posting social media account is the opposite of all this, making a mockery of it. And yet thanks to Elon Musk, figures like Ian Miles Cheong have more purchase on international affairs than the editors of Foreign Affairs. What is apparently trivial or unserious is in fact deathly serious. Because of Starlink, a poster in a Kuala Lumpur bedroom is directly linked to the Ukrainian front lines.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2024/04/10/dark-star-elon-musks-dangerous-turn-2024-by-...

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