Tech tycoon Elon Musk joined a call between US President-elect Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky the day after the presidential election, according to a source with knowledge of the situation.

    • jonne@infosec.pub
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      94
      ·
      14 days ago

      He’s going to be on the cabinet while getting billions in government contracts. The richest man in the world just got a job where he gets to to shovel more government money to himself. And that’s what Trump calls ‘draining the swamp’ and ‘sticking it to the elites’.

      And somehow, instead of democrats calling that out, they decided to find their own elites to trot out.

      • Magister@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        20
        ·
        14 days ago

        Worst of it, government money is your tax dollar… You will pay more and more taxes to funnel the money to Trump’s friends. Trump is the swamp thing!

        • jonne@infosec.pub
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          9
          ·
          14 days ago

          They’ll finance it with debt, sale of assets and cutting of services. Which is probably even worse

      • ContrarianTrail@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        14 days ago

        It wasn’t enabled in Crimea in the first place. The author misspoke/lied about in the book and has later admitted it.

        U.S. sanctions to Russia forbid the use of Starlink. This includes crimea and the occupied territories. That’s why it wasn’t enabled.

        To clarify on the Starlink issue: the Ukrainians THOUGHT coverage was enabled all the way to Crimea, but it was not. They asked Musk to enable it for their drone sub attack on the Russian fleet. Musk did not enable it, because he thought, probably correctly, that would cause a major war.

        And before someone points out the ‘cause major war’ things, those are Walters words, not Elon’s. Musk said “It would make SpaceX explicitly complicit in a marjor act of war and conflict escalation” He later also added that had he been contacted by the US officials and asked to enable it he would, but they didn’t.

          • ContrarianTrail@lemm.ee
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            13 days ago

            The front lines are not static so you can only imagine the difficulty SpaceX has trying to determine which terminal is in Ukranian use and which ones are Russian. For all we know, they may have disabled hundreds if not thousands of terminals they’ve found out to be used by the Russians and are getting no credit for it. I don’t buy into this narrative that Elon is personally invested into Russia winning. I’ve seen no evidence for it but plenty against it which everyone just seems to conveniently ignore because Musk bad.

    • Chainweasel@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      13 days ago

      Nah, he’ll use the location services from the dish to pinpoint the Ukrainian troop locations. If they’re smart they’ll start smashing them immediately.