Elon Musk: I, for one, welcome our new pasty overlord

I am just a simple country lawyer, but I don’t think that privatizing the military, the space program and world telecommunications was a good idea. The fact that Elon Musk has the World’s most formidable business intellect doesn’t undermine that opinion - in fact, it makes it stronger!

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Yes, to protect it from the idiot.

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He is indeed an idiot as and also it’s a problem that our society places enormous power and resources in the hands of our most broken, reckless humans who are completely devoid of empathy (and also insanely lucky):

He is driven by demons’: biographer Walter Isaacson on Elon Musk

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Got this when I clicked on your link:

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Crossing out a smaller cost and replacing it with a much bigger one is one way to do a sale I guess.

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Elon: I truly don’t give a single fuck about other people’s feelings but I pretend like I do when necessary to extract resources from them

Bobman: whoa, genius, next level!

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That… checks out? What am I missing here? We should not let idiots control critical infrastructure, actually.

Edit: replace “idiot” with “Neo-Nazi” if that’s more persuasive.

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Elizabeth Warren:

“The Congress needs to investigate what’s happened here and whether we have adequate tools to make sure foreign policy is conducted by the government and not by one billionaire,” the Massachusetts Democrat said Monday at the Capitol.

She has criticized Musk before. He called her a Karen. Musk is meeting with senators Wednesday.

Bloomerg (paywall)

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I don’t really like Elon Musk. He seems fishy to me.

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“Elon Musk designed and operates, manually, all of teh Starlinks.” -literally no one

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Nationalizing Starlink is kind of a dumb idea because it would cost like $100 billion and it’s predominantly civilian, but yeah, it’s definitely a weird and undesirable situation to have a random private company providing military communications to an ally on a vaguely defined, semi-charitable basis.

There are a lot of private companies providing military _____ to Ukraine on a vaguely defined, semi charitable basis.

Shouldn’t a contract with the government fix the Starlink issue? Part of the contract of the US paying is the US gets to say what gets turned on and turned off?

Seems like the US isn’t flexing its muscle, in completely normal ways, unlike going full bore nationalizing.

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This contract was agreed to after the fuckery being discussed and is now in effect.

“Elon Musk … is undoubtedly an outstanding person. It must be admitted. I think the whole world admits it. He is an active, talented businessman,” Putin said, according to a Reuters translation.

But Putin has also said

“I have known Prigozhin for a long time… He was a gifted man, a talented businessman,” Putin said.

Idk how seriously to take it but Elon’s family has supposedly worried that the Russians would assassinate him. What if Elon’s fear was not so much about nuclear war but about falling out a window?

Edit: There was a Ukrainian attack on the Crimean port of Sevastopol tonight. What Starlink doing at about that time?

My personal conspiracy theory is that Ukraine launched an attack on the ships in Crimea just to prove Musk got played by the Russians

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Does Russia have the capability to shoot down one of their satellites? Because they would be doing a lot to make it a more legit target for Russia if it was government controlled for supporting military operations against Russian forces

Definitely:

https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2022-03/features/russias-anti-satellite-weapons-asymmetric-response-us-aerospace-superiority