I mostly agree with your comment but "he shutdown Starlink in Ukraine" is misinfo? Musk literally say he did it. How is that misinfo?
https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/07/elon-musk...
”This specific case everybody's referring to, there was a shutdown of the coverage over Crimea, but it wasn't at that specific moment. That shutdown was for a month. There might have been some specific cases I'm not aware of. But I'm totally sure that throughout the whole first period of the war, there was no coverage at all.
…
There have been no problems since it's been turned on over Crimea.”
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/exclusive-interview-wi...
Isaacson for some reason interpreted that as them shutting it down in response, which got reported as if it were sabotage.
What actually happened, as reported by Isaacson: Elon called Isaacson in a fit one night, worried about how Ukraine seemed to be poised to use starlink to attack Sevastopol (Crimea). Isaacson reports explicitly that Elon, after much dithering, had starlink engineers secretly geofence starlink so it was disabled near Crimea.
THEN Ukraine discovered this. As reported by multiple noteworthy people on twitter and elsewhere, Ukraine had previously tested starlink's coverage, they didn't just build drone boats and hope that wherever they sent them, starlink would still work; think about how little sense that would make.
THEN Ukraine contacted SpaceX/Elon asking in a panic for starlink to be enabled (re-enabled), and Elon declined. (This is what Isaacson and Elon rely on for all their non-denial denials.)
Isaacson's "correction" of the record does not deny that Elon called that night, while "in a state". It doesn't deny that Elon reduced starlink coverage by telling engineers to do that on the down-low. It simply re-states the last thing in that series of events, that starlink was disabled near Crimea, and that Ukraine called to ask SpaceX to turn it on (really, turn it back on) and they declined.
Why would Elon have been so concerned about a Ukrainian drone-boat attack on Sevastopol using starlink navigation if such an attack wouldn't work by default? Why would he have communicated at length with Isaacson that night if Elon's narrative is to be believed?
It's tough, given all that, for me to see Isaacson's correction as anything other than a lie by omission. If he'd wanted to make a crystal clear correction, he certainly could have done so. He's a veteran journalist. He knows the art of the non-denial denial.
There was no service there during the Battle of Kyiv there too. At some time it will have had to be turned on for the turn off claim to be true.
>>As reported by multiple noteworthy people on twitter and elsewhere, Ukraine had previously tested starlink's coverage, they didn't just build drone boats and hope that wherever they sent them, starlink would still work; think about how little sense that would make.
Nope. They definitely had coverage just offshore Odessa. Doesn't mean Crimea is covered. Azovstal used to be covered. No reason to believe it is today
I don’t know, because he feels like it? Ukraine has no right to use a peacetime American funded, built, and operated satellite network to command drones to kill people.
Oh, they can’t use it for X offensive or Y attack? How is that our problem? Maybe they should ask the smart people in the EU to build and operate a space weapons program instead.