Hey everybody, welcome back to the Elon Musk Podcast.
This is a show where we discuss the critical crossroads that
shape SpaceX, Tesla X, The Boring Company, and Neurolink.
I'm your host, Will Walden. Elon Musk has ordered Starlink
coverage cut over parts of Ukraine and this is back in late
September of 2022. And the order disrupted
Ukrainian counter offensive and damaged Kiev's trust in a
service that had supported their military since the start of this
invasion. The instruction targeted areas
and included kerosene, which sits north of the Black Sea and
served as a strategic focus for Ukrainian forces.
The action marked the first known shutdown of Starlink over
an active battlefield in the war.
Now, Reuters documented the order and its impact through
interviews with people who carried it out and with
Ukrainian personnel who experienced the outage.
Now, who gets to decide whether a private network that carries
battlefield communications stays on during a war with an Elon
Musk? Now, one directive inside a
company changed the course of a specific operation and exposed
how much military communications depend on Elon Musk, the private
owner of SpaceX. Now we're going to set off a
chain of responses inside Ukraine, Washington and SpaceX
that reveal A fragile arrangement around access to
Starlink in conflict zones. In this episode, must deliver
the order through a senior engineer at SpaceX who ran
Starlink operations in California.
He told the engineer to cut coverage in set areas that
included kerosene and parts of Donetsk, and this is where
Ukraine sought to advance to. Staff turned off at least 100
terminals and an internal coverage map showed hexagon
shaped cells going dark. Team members described an abrupt
switch off that followed a simple instruction.
We have to do this now, Michael Nichols, the star LINK engineer,
told colleagues upon receiving the order.
Multiple people with direct knowledge confirmed that the
team complied with this order. Frontline units saw
communications blackout as the cut took hold.
Soldiers lost connections, aerial drones that surveilled
Russian forces went dark, and long range artillery units lost
the data they used to aim. Ukrainian officers who pushed to
encircle a Russian position could not complete this
maneuver. The encirclement stalled
entirely. It failed.
Ukrainian forces later reclaimed the city of Karason, along with
nearby territories without the help of Starlink.
People inside SpaceX who watched the cut said the decision
shocked some of their employees. They also said the outage helped
shape where the front lines settled.
During the phase of fighting. They saw a private order create
operational effects that matched military decisions.
Public statements from Musk did not match the account, though he
wrote on X in March. We would never do such a thing.
Who do you believe? Let me know in the comments.
Musk and Nichols did not respond to requests from us or from
Reuters or from any other news outlet.
A SpaceX spokesperson called the reporting inaccurate in an
e-mail and pointed to a private statement on X.
They said Sterling is fully committed to providing service
to Ukraine is a blanket statement.
The company did not identify specific errors and did not
answer answer detailed questions about the outage or about
Starlink's wartime use. The office President Vladimir
Zelinsky and the minister of defense did not respond to
questions about this either. Starlink continues to provide
service in Ukraine and the military keeps using it for some
communications. But Zelensky expressed gratitude
to Musk for Starlink earlier this year in public remarks.
Now, three people that were familiar with Musk's decision
said he acted out of concern that the Ukrainian advance could
trigger nuclear retaliation from Moscow.
The outage began around September 30th, 2022, a few days
after after Putin warned that Russia could use nuclear weapons
if its territorial integrity were threatened.
Officials in Kiev in Washington, who helped secure Starlink
access for Ukraine after the February 22 invasion, reacted
with alarm when they learned of the blackout.
The exact timing of the order remains unclear in the
reporting, though Starlink has become central to Ukraine's
battlefield communications. Troops pilot drones over the
network, units move targeted data access with it, and
commanders coordinate frontline operations through its
terminals. Ukraine has more than 50,000
Starling terminals in use, and Poland supplied about half of
them. Now this is alarming, but SpaceX
can turn on and off service through geofencing that maps
coverage into cells that appear as hexagons and an internal
display. Think of like Civilization if
you've ever played that game. Very similar to that, and
engineers can deactivate groups of terminals in those cells with
centralized commands. They can just turn anything off
they want to. No international process
currently sets rules for how a private satellite Internet
provider manages access during a conflict.
They don't have to go through the military, they don't have to
go through Zelensky, they don't have to go through any
governments. They can just shut it off.
Starlink now operates the world's world's largest
satellite network, with more than 7900 spacecraft in orbit.
The service is on track to generate nearly $10 billion in
revenue this year, which would make up about 60% of Spacex's
income. Musk retains private control
over the system, too. He can do whatever he wants.
Musk has described Starlink as essential to Ukraine's defense.
He said. My Starlink system is the
backbone of the Ukrainian army. Their entire frontline would
collapse if it turned it off. The remark captures the leverage
that comes with control over the service.
With great power comes great responsibility for Elon.
Governments that rely on commercial networks in war will
face recurring questions about authority, contracts and
continuity. Military planners can define
service boundaries and escalation triggers and written
agreements, but private owners still execute the switches that
route data during combat. The 2022 blackout showed how one
internal instruction can ripple through a battle plan and also
change the world's fate. Possibly butterfly effect.
Think about that. When a single network carries
command control and targeting links, it's dangerous.
And Musk ordered that shutdown over parts of Ukraine during a
key push in September of 2022. Ukraine lost units and
communications, and they also lost the planned encirclement
and it failed because of this. Let me know in the comments
which think, do you think Eli did the right thing or do you
think he was doing it because he was scared?
Do you think he was a reactionary or do you think he
had this all planned out and he thinks that, you know, Putin
would have caused a nuclear war if Ukraine moved forward?
Let me know. Hey, thank you so much for
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