How Musk survives

The anniversary of the Russo-Ukraine War missed one of the most important events: Musk sending Starlink satellites to keep Internet service going in Ukraine. He stepped in — at the government’s request — two days after the Russian invasion.

It began the day after the invasion, when Mykhailo Fedorov, the vice prime minister of Ukraine and minister of digital transformation, tweeted, “Help Me Obi-Wan Kenobi, You're My Only Hope.”

No, no, no. That was from a 45-year-old movie.

The tweet was, “Elon Musk, while you try to colonize Mars — Russia try to occupy Ukraine! While your rockets successfully land from space — Russian rockets attack Ukrainian civil people! We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations and to address sane Russians to stand.”

12 hours later, Musk tweeted, “Starlink service is now active in Ukraine. More terminals en route.”

CNBC explained, “Starlink ultimately wants to provide the world with faster internet, starting by improving internet access in parts of the world that aren’t currently served by broadband providers.

“It allows people to connect to the internet via a satellite dish that is placed on or near a person’s property. The internet is beamed down to the dish via a network of Starlink satellites that have been put into orbit by SpaceX and ground stations.”

He did this before wearing blue and yellow became fashionable. I don’t recall Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett or any of the other Social Justice Billionaires doing anything. Maybe Bezos’s Washington Post in an editorial lobbied for Biden to print up some more money and give it to Zelensky.

Musk answered Ukraine’s call because it was in his best interest. Let us review his dire situation as the richest man in the world.

Icarus flew too close to the sun and fell to his death. Jack Ma — the richest man in Red China — criticized the communist party — and fell as well. Elon Musk learned those lessons and is building a power base bigger than his wealth. He has to because it is the only way he can survive without pimping social justice communism.

In Ukraine, Musk built goodwill and perhaps made some money. I hope Zelensky and his merry band of thieves paid him for services rendered — and paid him at a premium. This is not war profiteering. This is aiding in an emergency. I once paid a plumber triple time for a deed the day after Christmas. That is not a complaint. Needs arise, you pay.

But the media did not appreciate Musk’s plumber’s help.

The Atlantic rued two days after the good deed began, “The War on Ukraine Is Testing the Myth of Elon Musk.

“The SpaceX CEO’s much-praised move to help keep the country online isn’t the magical fix it may seem.”

Well, if you expected Musk to win the war for Zelensky, I suppose you could call it a failure. And Marina Koren did so within 48 hours.

She wrote, “Nearly 1,600 operational Starlink satellites are currently in orbit. In the years to come, Musk, currently the richest person in the world, plans to blanket the space around Earth with thousands more. The cult of personality surrounding Musk, coupled with the nature of Starlink’s high-flying operations, cast the SpaceX CEO as an almost godlike figure—our great internet savior, making Wi-Fi rain down from the sky. But Musk is a businessman, not a philanthropist. And SpaceX doesn’t exist to beam internet down from the heavens; the company was founded with the express purpose of putting people on Mars and, as Musk’s tagline goes, ‘making life multiplanetary.’ Musk wants to save humanity by colonizing Mars, not by giving everyone internet, and Starlink is supposed to help finance that deep-space effort. But as Musk builds out his Starlink network, he could extend his influence across the globe, potentially giving people—or taking away—an essential component of modern life.

“For now, in the context of the Ukraine crisis, the myth around Musk has outpaced what Musk can actually do. Perhaps Starlink will someday prove useful in conflict zones, Scott-Railton said, and he hopes that both SpaceX and government officials will keep an eye out for any Russian interference. ‘It’s great to see the devices crossing the border and the first signs of follow-through,’ he said. But a truck full of Starlinks is a well-intentioned start, not a magic fix.”

Those two paragraphs show why when I buy a news organization, I will fire all the college graduate reporters and replace them with people who are not indoctrinated fools. I will keep the English majors as they make good editors. I will improve their salaries as well.

Musk is a businessman not a philanthropist? Hallelujah. Gates runs around sucking up to Red China and funding the UN’s WHO. Musk just wants to make money so he can colonize Mars and perhaps save the human race.

He is creative. Whereas Gates built Microsoft on technology stolen from others — excuse me, reverse engineered — Musk is building electric vehicles that work, boring tunnels in LA to lessen street traffic, exploring space and running Twitter, the latter causing him all sorts of trouble.

The Twitter files exposed the deep state’s involvement in Twitter (and other social media) censoring conservatives and suppressing the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which the FBI had protected from investigation for nearly a year. Had the public known about the laptop in 2019, Biden would not have been the Democrat nominee.

Given that the deep state sank Nixon’s presidency less than two years after he carried 49 states and was elected to a second term, Musk does not merely play with fire but with nuclear waste. Look at how the deep state went after President Trump.

However, given their track record so far on Trump, perhaps two generations after Watergate, the deep state is run by indoctrinated fools. That’s the trouble with choosing indoctrination over education. You wind up with parrots, not songbirds.

Musk is playing the game by embracing the Pentagon with a militarized version of Starlink. This is a source of money and political goodwill.

CNBC reported on December 5, 2022, “Elon Musk’s SpaceX is expanding its Starlink satellite technology into military applications with a new business line called Starshield.

“Starshield is likely to further tap the company’s biggest U.S. government customer — the Pentagon — which already represents a high-value buyer of SpaceX’s launches and has shown significant interest in the capabilities of Starlink.”

By making the Pentagon reliant on him, he has a powerful ally against the FBI and other abusers of federal power.

Impact Lab reported on January 22, 2023, “SpaceX's New Project Is A Middle Finger To Putin.”

The story said, “This militarized version of Starlink, dubbed Starshield by Elon Musk, can function as a high-speed space-based communications system as well as carry additional payloads, allowing it to function as a highly flexible, highly detailed, and global earth observatory. Starshield satellites are based on V1.5 and V2.0 Starlink satellites, but they are larger and more powerful (with twice the solar cell area), which enables them to carry and power additional payloads. One such payload will be military imaging technology that will enable Starshield to identify and track objects of interest on the surface of Earth. So far, this is the only confirmed additional payload, though it is likely that the NDSA has other technologies in the works for these incredible missions.

“The first of these Starshield satellites was supposed to launch in September 2022, but SpaceX struggled to source the electronics needed, causing delays. They are now expected to launch in mid-December 2022. These initial launches are more closely aligned with the US government (as it is they who are paying for the launch), but SpaceX has hinted that other governments, most likely those in NATO, could use them to avoid complications with their US funding. Therefore, the United States and its closest allies will soon have military communications and intelligence at an unprecedented level.”

Liberals hate Musk with a passion they usually reserve for Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Trump.

Time magazine reported on February 3, 2022, “Elon Musk Should Not Be In Charge of the Night Sky.”

Time gave us more of the Trust Government garbage it has peddled since founder Henry Luce died in 1967.

It said, “For the past few years, we’ve been coming to terms with how overhyping the tech industry had social consequences, including things like social media misinformation and labor abuses. Luckily, those are problems we can address with regulation, but that’s much harder with Starlink and the satellite race Musk has kicked off. The Federal Communications Commission recently reorganized its Space division to ‘better support the needs of the growing satellite industry,’ rather than question whether so many satellites should be launched in the first place — and that won’t cover the satellite constellations coming from Europe, China, and beyond. As public opinion continues to shift against Elon Musk, we need to think twice about the visions he’s been selling us, and that includes what goals we’re actually achieving by launching tens of thousands of additional satellites into orbit.”

Musk is making the right enemies but more importantly, he is making the right friends. I am far from a supporter of propping Ukraine but I am impressed with his efforts to quickly aid a country under attack. Do not measure humanitarianism by the amount of money you send the WHO bureaucracy. Measure it by the aid you give people when they are down on their luck.