Irish Examiner view: Musk has to stop playing these silly games

A piece of infrastructure as vital as Ukraine's internet connectivity ought not be subject to a billionaire's playground antics

Elon Musk has been engaging in childish teasing about Russia and Ukraine when the former is waging an illegal war against the latter. File picture: Britta Pedersen/Getty

Starlink is a satellite-based internet concern owned and run by SpaceX, the American spacecraft manufacturer and space launch provider which is in turn owned by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. 

Since the illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine in February, Starlink has been providing satellite internet terminals to the Ukrainian government, which have been vital in keeping the country’s military online during the war with Russia, even as terrestrial communications infrastructure is being destroyed on a daily basis.

But the billionaire caused ructions in Kyiv recently when he promoted a Twitter poll gauging support for what he claimed was the likely outcome of the conflict.

It prompted Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy to conduct his own poll, which asked: “Which Elon Musk do you like more? One who supports Ukraine or one who supports Russia?”

Musk’s poll also got short shrift from Ukraine’s outgoing ambassador to Germany, Andrij Melnyk, who responded: “Fuck off is my very diplomatic reply to you.”

Which @elonmusk do you like more?

— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) October 3, 2022

Musk claimed last week that SpaceX could not continue to fund Starlink communications in Ukraine “indefinitely” and he asked the Pentagon to foot the estimated $400m bill over the next 12 months. 

By the weekend he had changed his tune and his tone and said SpaceX would continue to fund Starlink in Ukraine. “The hell with it… we’ll just keep funding the Ukraine govt for free,” he tweeted.

His unwanted intervention in the war and his threat to pull the services of a critical infrastructural service suggest someone who’s not necessarily in touch with geopolitics right now. 

His playground antics are proving tiresome in the extreme. Perhaps he should just grow up.