Angry Planet - Why We Have to Care About Elon Musk

Episode Date: October 27, 2022

Today we’re talking about Elon Musk — not because we want to, but because we have to. As we all know, the man is rich. I don’t mean merely wealthy, I mean he could pay off a good portion of the national deficit.He’s also not shy, to the point where he likes to tell entire countries what to do. They may not do it, but they’re forced to react.Bloomberg’s Iain Marlow, who covers diplomacy, has written a great piece about what Musk is up to now.Musk Tweets Complicate US Diplomacy From Ukraine to TaiwanThe CNN piece where the DoD throws Musk under the busAngry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world with their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello, and welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Jason Fields. Matthew Galt is in New York, and I'm insanely jealous. Today we're talking about Elon Musk, not because we want to, but because we have to. As we all know, the man is rich. I don't mean merely wealthy, and he could pay off a good portion of the national deficit. He's also not shy to the point where he feels like entire countries need to know what he thinks.

They may not do what he says, but they're forced to react. Bloomberg's Ian Marlowe, who covers diplomacy, has written a great great great. piece about what Musk is up to now. And thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, no worries. Thanks for having me. So what did Musk say about or to Ukraine? Where did he say it? Just if you could tell the basic story, it would be great. Yeah, Elon Musk has been tweeting. And as usual, people pay pretty close attention to his tweets, given he has well over 100 million followers and is the world's richest man, et cetera. He started tweeting a sort of interesting peace plan for how to solve the Russia-Ukraine war. And people were paying attention not just because he's Elon Musk

and is tweeting something contrarian, but he was really involved in Ukraine in the conflict because his Starlink satellite communications company, an offshoot of his SpaceX rocket company, was actually providing internet to Ukraine's military and civilians in a situation where Russian attacks had hit internet infrastructure and was leading to power outages and the rest of it. So he was engaged and then he tweeted the sort of poll that was on Twitter that went viral. It was suggesting basically that Ukraine cede territory to Russia in order to end the conflict. It went all the way up to President Zelensky, all sorts of Ukrainian diplomats and Europeans. and foreign ministers and former prime ministers were tweeting about it. And it caused a big stink,

basically. Does Musk have any kind of connection that we know about to either Ukrainian government, the Russian government, anybody else? Yeah. So it was an interesting, it seems to be very clear that he's, he has some, he's had conversations with Ukrainian officials. I think he originally sent Starlink got Starlink involved in Ukraine after their minister for digital staff tweeted out a request. The connection with Russia is a lot murkier because a sort of geopolitical guru and Eurasia group chief Ian Bremmer in one of his weekly newsletters on geopolitics suggested that Musk had told him that Musk had spoken to Putin in advance of the quote unquote peace proposal, which happens to dovetail perfectly with what Vladimir Putin would like to see out of the Ukraine conflict,

which he, depending on who you talk to, it doesn't seem to be going very well. So if he could get out of it with territory, extra territory and claim a victory, that would be great for him. And so people started wondering, okay, did Musk speak to Putin and is now floating this idea on behalf of Putin or what? And Musk very quickly on Twitter, deny. that he had spoken to Putin. So, and then Ian Bremer, who a lot of people know, he consults with companies and governments and is widely followed on Twitter and elsewhere, doubled down and said, I stand by what I said. And so at the moment, it's, do you believe Ian Bremer or do you believe Elon Musk?

And that's the conundrum for some of us who follow this. I follow this. I'll pretend I don't have an opinion. I don't know. So can you say a little bit about what Starlink is and just how important it is? Why? What's it doing? Yeah. So it's interesting. It's to be very honest. I actually used to cover telecommunications as a reporter back in the day. So I know how difficult and expensive and often quite bad satellite

internet service can be. If you live in the countryside, you might be forced to be familiar with it. It's expensive. It's slow. And the rest of it, Starlink seems to get around this. There's an upfront cost for a kind of sleek looking dish. And then for, monthly charge, you're basically getting internet, but I've never used it, but it is apparently good enough that a lot of people in Ukraine, whether it's the military or civilians who don't have access to cell towers or broadband internet as a result of either power outages or infrastructure being destroyed, are able to make calls, use data, send videos, send data. In some cases, it's like drone data. It's pretty high bandwidth.

stuff. And so there's all sorts of indications that if it wasn't for Starlink, a lot of frontline troops, certain drone operators and drones have been obviously very important in the conflict in terms of targeting for artillery and other things and reconnaissance and the rest of it, that none of that would really be working without Starlink. And so it's become very, the country has become very reliant on it. And there's a bit of a debate here because shortly after his peace proposal, controversy went viral and got batted around. He later came out and said that he was going to stop providing Starlink for free or at a discount in Ukraine, which upset a lot of people because it was actively, it follows this really bizarre suggestion that Ukraine seed territory.

So that had angered a lot of officials. A lot of the officials hit back at Musk. And one of them, I think the former German ambassador, the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany said, said, F off, basically. right and so musk then tweeted i don't want to pay for this anymore starlink is losing a bunch of money a lot of satellite companies who try to do what we're doing are going bankrupt so i'm going to stop funding it by the way all these other defense industry companies are selling stuff via the pentagon to to ukraine and making billions of dollars off it so why am i providing this for free so that alarmed quite a few people and then there was a debate about how crucial starlink was and whether Musk was touting a particular line, whether he was, again, following through on the stuff where

people thought he had maybe had conversations with Putin or something, that he was taking sides. And then eventually he decided, again, contrarian to start to, I'm not, we're not going to charge. We're going to keep providing it. And so the whole controversy died down again. But that's what Starlink is and how Starlink got involved in the controversy here. Hey, there, Angry Planet listeners. This is Matthew speaking to you in the final edit, the last pass, giving this a listen over. I thought I just wanted to interject myself here, just a little bit,

to provide some more interesting context, a little bit more information that I think goes in this story. And you know what? I didn't write any of it down. We're just going to go off the top of my head, kind of with what I know.

I've actually been reporting this out as part of a longer feature for Vice that will come later. Yeah, Elon Musk, Starlink, Mila Musk's connections to the Department of Defense. They go back quite a ways. And I think that the way all of this stuff played out with Starlink is really funny. Much funnier than these two dry boys are giving it credit for.

Sorry, Jason. So the way all of this went down is that after Musk tweeted about Starlink and then all the people got mad at him online, CNN came out with a really funny story where essentially military people had reached out to CNN and leaked a whole bunch of SpaceX documents to them, completely throwing Elon Musk under the bus. Now, this happened specifically because before he tweeted, Musk had had SpaceX send what is essentially like a breakup letter for Ukraine to the DOD, kind of basically the formal version of what he'd put in Twitter saying, like, we can't afford to pay for this. the Pentagon's going to have to kick in more money.

And the Pentagon, in response, after the tweet was like, all right, well, fuck you, buddy. We're going to go ahead and go to the press, which is like super wild for the Pentagon to do. And to be clear, the provenance of this documents, according to the CNN story, was just that they were obtained by CNN. But, you know, there's two sources for where they came from. And I'm guessing that the Starlink was not the one that turned them over, or rather SpaceX was not the one that turned them over. All right. And here, I'm just, the other thing that the Pentagon did, that it doesn't always do is that it gave some quotes.

So I'm just going to read directly from the CNN paper here. SpaceX requested the U.S. military foot the bill has rankled top brass of the Pentagon, with one senior defense official telling CNN that SpaceX has, quote, the gall to act like heroes while having others pay so much and now presenting them with a bill for tens of millions of dollars per month. According to the SpaceX figures shared with the Pentagon, about 85% of the 20,000 terminals in Ukraine were paid or partially paid for by countries like the U.S. and Poland and other entities.

Those entities also paid for about 30% of the internet connectivity, which SpaceX says costs about $4,500 a month each month per unit for the most advanced service. And it was after this, after the military pushed back on him, that Musk relented and said, okay, you know what, we'll keep paying for stuff. It's fine. Whatever. So I think this is really interesting for a couple of reasons. the biggest being that Musk and the Pentagon are in this kind of twisted relationship

because here's the thing. Elon Musk is full of shit about a lot of subjects. You know, famously doesn't own any patents and bought a lot of the things that he's kind of claimed to have invented or people, there was a popular perception of him that he's invented. But he does have a lot of military contracts. And the military contract stuff happens to be things that he tends to deliver on.

The thing about the Starlink is that, yeah, there's some issues with it, but it has really helped Ukraine. And he has broken the kind of this problem of battlefield communication. He's figured out satellite internet. It's expensive. But when you're on the battlefield and you're fighting for your life, he's done it. Like this is a good product. We wouldn't be having this conversation if it didn't work. and it wasn't out there helping the Ukraine's people communicate with each other.

So the DOD sees this, and even though they've been footing most of the bill and Musk is crying poor mouth, they just want to push him and keep pressure on him because they want to keep that relationship up. And this is not the only military contract that Musk is involved in. SpaceX, in general, beyond just Starlink, has a lot of different contracts with the military. I think we've said on the show before that, you know, we say a military runs on its stomach, right? The reason that the U.S. military is so dominant is not because it has the best toys. It's because its logistics arms are incredible because it can get anything, anywhere else in the world, is quicker than anyone else. That's what makes them so dominant.

And going forward, the crazy stuff that the military is talking about doing sounds like it comes at a Warhammer 40K. I'm sorry for anyone that doesn't get that reference. Just bear with me. There's a logistics program being run by the National Defense Transportation Association right now, where they're talking about replacing the C-17 with SpaceX rockets. This would mean that literally if you need to move something across the planet, you would shoot a rocket, a SpaceX rocket up into the air, and then it would land wherever those objects needed to be.

You could possibly move troops and weapons this way in the near future. That's a big contract. You know, Musk's future is tied up in the U.S. military. And this is also not the first time that he's run a foul of them. Back in 2018, Musk went on the Joe Rogan show, and he smoked up a fucking dube. Now, most people can smoke up a dupe on the Joe Rogan show, and it's going to be fine. But when you're Elon Musk and you've got billions of dollars tied up all over the planet, much of that in military contracts, well, the military, they didn't care for that.

Air Force was trying to figure out what it wanted to do about that. A lot of these places have, like, cultural stuff in some of their military contracts that kind of guide what your workplace is supposed to look like. People at NASA in the upper echelons were saying, like, you know what, we don't like him smoking weed in public and being a military contractor. In the end, NASA paid SpaceX $5 million in taxpayer money to do an internal audit about its culture. culture because Musk smoked weed on the Joe Rogan show. Musk in the military, they can't quit each other. And it's just going to get stupider from here. Anyway, you want to take a break, listen to some ads.

If you're listening to the Substack version, which you get to listen to early, you don't have to listen to ads. We'll be back after this. Hey there, welcome back, Angry Planet listeners. This is Matthew. All right, I'm going to give you back over to Jason to continue talking about Elon Musk. It's interesting to me because looking at your article, I think the number was $80 million that Musk was complaining about. And me, I'll be honest with you, it's more than I make in a year.

But to him, barely, barely, barely. To him, it just seems like such a drop in the bucket. But does the U.S. government care if he provides this? Do you think it's that crucial? It's hard to say. I think the Ukrainians definitely believe it's crucial. I think the U.S. government is in a weird situation where, you know, I spoke to people at the State Department about this, and they deal diplomatically with places like Ukraine and also Taiwan, which is a separate Musk controversy that came up recently, which we can talk about. But the senses is that they're reassuring allies and partners that he is a private citizen.

They don't want to, they very much say, and this has come all the way from the White House, that he does not. represent the U.S. government in any way in any of these conversations or any of his opinions that are going out there. But it is very awkward for the government in the sense that he is, he's not just America's richest person, is the world's richest person, but he's also, through SpaceX, has a ton of Pentagon contracts. And so he's, I think a few of us have wondered throughout this process, what would it be like if the head of Boeing or the head of Lockheed Martin or the head of one of these other very big sort of defense companies that actively provides equipment to the military and all this stuff? What would have? What would

happen if there were rumors that they were talking with Putin or what would happen if they were sort of actually second guessing or in some ways undermining U.S. foreign policy and national security goals? And it's not a clear answer. It's a bit of a murky territory. And I think Musk is such a unique case given his wealth and his influence and the sort of role his companies have come to play in certain industries that it's hard to extrapolate and also realize how much of he's like an anomaly or otherwise. So it's a bit confusing. You just mentioned China briefly. What other incidents can you talk a little bit about what he said about China? Yeah. So there was this sort of long profile of Elon Musk that came out in the Financial Times a week ago where he just starts

musing. And for anyone who has spoken to a billionaire before, they have a tendency to be very confident and self-assured and offer opinions. And I've had that through the course of my career. I say some pretty interesting things sometimes. And so anyway, he starts talking about Taiwan and suggesting that Taiwan become a special administrative zone of China. And for listeners who may not necessarily know the intricate sort of geopolitics of China and Taiwan and the East Asia more broadly and the sort of the power of language around there, is that Taiwan is nominally for all intents and purposes, acts as a sort of sovereign country internally, but it is claimed by China. It doesn't have a seat at the UN or any international organizations.

And so the question of Taiwan status is very sensitive. China also tends to use special administrative regions and zones in sensitive areas internally that either were not originally part of territorial China or that were later kind of colonial acquisitions under later dynasties like Xinjiang. which is a special administrative region. To say, so anyway, so the idea of Taiwan obviously is a huge flashpoint between the U.S. and China. And he just suggests in these comments to the FT that it just become part of China, which of course, if you follow the polling in Taiwan, nobody wants.

And particularly, they definitely don't want it after they saw what happened to Hong Kong, which is also a special administrative region. Yeah, special administrative region of China, which obviously had protests in 2019. I was actually there. I was in Hong Kong for, yeah, I was in Hong Kong for Bloomberg between 2019. and 2021. And the people that we spoke to in Taiwan around that time, we're following that very closely because China's one country, two systems is nominally. It was like China can, one country, but you could have communism in the mainland and capitalism in Hong Kong,

and freedom and the rest of it, which apparently in the end is not exactly what's happening in Hong Kong. They cracked down after the protest. They arrested a bunch of people without trial. A lot of people that I'd known and interviewed over the years and had lunch with and this kind of stuff. So Taiwan was watching that. And so the idea to suggest that Taiwan just become part of China via some administrative region or zone is deeply, deeply offensive to that Taiwan. And so that also caused a lot of controversy. It was shortly after his Ukraine-Russia comments. And this led people to think, okay, look, he's he's basically in some ways aping Vladimir Putin's lines on Russia.

Here he is in some ways repeating or amplifying China's longer-term strategy for Taiwan. Why is he doing this? And is it just coincidence that these things happen to dovetail with two of America's biggest geopolitical rivals? The other thing is that he actually also has quite a lot of business interests in China. His, I think the biggest Tesla factory is around Shanghai. And the company derives about 25% of his revenue from China in terms of sales. So again, it's billionaires tend to speak up and get very invested in areas where they themselves have invested interests or business ties and stuff. So a lot of people.

No conflict of interest there whatsoever. Yeah, exactly. That seems fair. The Taiwan issue is a huge one between the United States right now and China. China. If anyone who follows diplomacy, for example, as you do, knows that this is a potential flashpoint. And there's so much talk around the idea that if Putin can get away with invading Ukraine, then China may feel, I hate the word emboldened, but emboldened to take Taiwan militarily. It just seems like, where's Musk going next? Does he get involved in Ethiopia? I guess there's

no business interest there for him. Yeah, it's difficult to, I think to some extent, it seems like this is someone who used to being in a room probably where quite a lot of people say yes to him. And, you know, his ideas are implemented quickly and no nonsense. And I don't necessarily know his views on government per se. One can assume that a lot of business people think government is bureaucratic and status quo and the rest of it. And so here I am with these brilliant ideas.

Why isn't anyone implementing them? And it's so simple. Why don't you just give back territory to Russia and call it the day and the war will be over? And why not Taiwan just become part of China? That would just solve the issue. I think it's, it's, these issues are very complicated. And Musk is a busy man and may not have had time to look into the details. But it's hard to know. And it's hard to know whether he stops here or keeps going. And one can imagine he will keep going, tweeting and opinionating, whether it's on cryptocurrencies or other sort of. internet hot takes, but he does have quite a lot of money and quite a lot of his businesses are large. And so it's hard to know, again, going back to that idea that this is, he is such a unique case. It's kind of a little bit hard to extrapolate. It's also a little bit hard to predict in the sense of what he might do next or what he personally would be interested in. And some of the stuff with Twitter, for instance, like is on again, off again, pursuit or on again, off again, pursuit of Twitter is an example of that. He could end up owning a very large social media

platform, which again, he has well over 100 million followers on and uses to get this sort of attention. He does have an outsized influence on various debates. And if he ends up going through with the Twitter purchase, there's a chance that he could, whether directly or indirectly, shape or influence some of these debates in the future, if not like outcomes and as directly as his concrete proposals for something. He might just influence the debate the way Mark Zuckerberg does in the sense of if they tweak a switch or tweak an algorithm, it could have an impact on election and say India or somewhere else. So it's hard to know. Or even bring Trump back onto the platform, just someone else, regardless about how you feel about Trump, just someone whose voice is

that loud. Yeah. And he said he'd do that. He said he would bring it back. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, that's one example. There's another conversation to be had about just how incredibly influential Twitter is between. There's one other thing that you brought up in the article that I just wanted to hit on. Just the idea of the private citizen and private citizens getting involved in foreign policy. Is that something you've given any thought to? You wrote just a little bit about it, but Musk isn't the first. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think, I mean, there's this like, Dennis Rodman, the sort of North Korea episodes that people may remember. I think there's a certain like strangeness to it and that they and Elon must to some extent is a celebrity. And so

they wield outsized influence and they get involved. And I think in the Dennis Rodman case, and some of the other cases, you can imagine all these, recall all these US celebrities who get involved with UN or humanitarian stuff, generally they're not what people would consider malign actors or influences. They're using their voice and their money in some cases to advance goals that we would view as notable or worthy or whatever. In this case, his involvement as a private citizen was complicated because he has more influence than the average person. And he was actively suggesting stuff that ran counter to U.S. policy. There is actually, and I'm actually Canadian, I'm not American, so I'm not deeply familiar in some cases with American legislation

and laws. But there is legislation that actually prohibits people. I believe it's the Logan Act. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, that bars U.S. citizens from the undermining U.S. foreign policy. And people had brought that legislation up. With relation to Musk, it's saying, is he potentially violating this act? Apparently, it's very archaic.

No, it's not, I don't think it's being used in a very long time. But it raises interesting questions as an actor, as a private actor, coming into sort of the grand domain of U.S. foreign policy. And it's not, he has gotten a lot of attention through this. We can talk about him being on Twitter and is it cartoonish and it seems a bit flash in the pan, but Putin's spokesman, Peskov, praised his plan for Ukraine, China's ambassador to Washington, and then later China's foreign ministry praised his plan for Taiwan.

His statements went all the way up to the White House National Security Council spokesman Kirby, batted it down. It's being dealt with the State Department. And then it's, because of his outsized influence, he's gotten a lot of attention for this. And it's all the way up to Ukraine's president who probably has other things to be worrying about. Yeah, so it's interesting. He's not just a, you know, he obviously on one side, he's a private citizen, but he's an incredibly influential one.

So it makes it a bit strange. It did actually make me think about Teddy Roosevelt, just as one example where Teddy Roosevelt, before he was president, put together his own military and went into key. Cuba, the rough riders and decided that he would fight there. Sure, that's, that sounds like a good idea. Anyway, I just want to say, I think that Musk hopefully is a special case. The only thing, just in terms of it's related to this, that might be interesting, is that as a journalist, sort of writing this story, with any story, really, reach out to people for, for comment. And, And as we're doing this story, you know, I basically wanted, we'd be talking about it with editors and says, oh, we should reach out to Elon Musk and working for Bloomberg.

Someone had his contact details. I sent him an email. I believe it was fairly polite. Just dear Mr. Musk laid out what we were saying in the story, what some of the people that we were quoting said and what their sort of criticism of his tweets on geopolitics were. And sent off the email. In some cases, people respond back, some case they don't. this one we weren't expecting him to ever write back. Grab a coffee, came back, it's my desk.

And there's an email from Elon Musk just sitting in my inbox. And I click it and open it up. And it just says, he had written the email back as very clearly to signal that he wanted this to be used in the story. I put quotes around it and put his name at the end. And it just said, when did Bloomberg News become worthless trash? And so we put it in the story because that was his comment. It so goes along with everything you've said about being in an echo chamber. Yeah, that's wonderful.

It was late on a Friday afternoon and it was a very kind of interesting way to end the week. Ian, thank you so much for joining me today to talk us through all this. What a weird world. What a weird world this all is. It is a weird one. And thank you for having me. I enjoyed it. That's all for this week, Angry Planet listeners.

As always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. It was created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, if you really like the show, kick us $9. On our substack at Angry Planetpod.com or AngryPlanent.substack.com. Get you commercial-free versions of the mainline episodes as well as you get the episodes two days early. And also, bonus episodes. Guess what? There's another bonus episode this week.

It's about something. we don't normally talk about, and I will leave that as a tease for those who are interested in signing up at angryplanetpod.com or angryplanet.substack.com. We will be back next week with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then.