Elon Musk became the shadow ruler of America: the US authorities trusted him too much and lost control

Justice Department files lawsuit against Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) Corporation for discrimination against asylum seekers and refugees in employment. The lawsuit alleges that from September 2018 to May 2022, SpaceX regularly discouraged asylum seekers and refugees from applying and refused to hire or consider them because of their status. How the US government began to rely very heavily on a technological billionaire, and now is trying to rein him in, the publication told The New Yorker.

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Why am I calling Elon Musk?

In October 2022, Colin Kahl, then Undersecretary of Defense for Policy at the Pentagon, was sitting in a Paris hotel preparing to make a phone call to avert catastrophe in Ukraine. The employee handed him an iPhone. Kahl returned to his room after a full day of meetings with British, French and German officials. A senior Department of Defense official said that Kahl was surprised by who he was going to contact: "Why am I calling Elon Musk?"

The reason soon became apparent.

“While Musk is not technically a diplomat or statesman, I felt it was important to treat him as such given the impact he had on this issue,” Kahl said.

SpaceX, Musk's space company, has been providing Internet access throughout Ukraine for several months, allowing the country's armed forces to plan attacks and defend themselves.

But in recent days, the Ukrainian military discovered that communications had been cut as they entered Russian-occupied territory. Even more troubling, SpaceX then only recently issued an ultimatum to the Pentagon: if the company does not bear the cost of providing services in Ukraine, which, according to the company's calculations, is about $400 million a year, it will cut off access.

“We started to panic a little,” recalls a senior Defense Department official. “Musk could turn it off at any time, and this would have real operational consequences for the Ukrainians.”

Musk became involved in the war in Ukraine shortly after the Russian invasion in February 2022. Along with conventional attacks, the Kremlin carried out cyber attacks on Ukraine's digital infrastructure. Ukrainian officials and a coalition of expatriates from the tech sector, brainstorming in WhatsApp and Signal group chats, have found a potential solution: SpaceX, which makes a line of mobile Internet terminals called Starlink.

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Tripod-mounted dishes, each the size of a computer display and clad in white plastic, reminiscent of the sleek design of Tesla Musk's electric cars, connect to a network of satellites. The units have a limited range, but in this situation this was an advantage: although a nationwide network of antennas was required, it would be difficult for Russia to completely destroy Ukrainian communications. Of course, Musk could do it.

The three people involved in bringing Starlink to Ukraine, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared that Musk might withdraw his services if he got upset, told The New Yorker's Ronan Farrow that they initially overlooked the significance of his personal control.

“No one thought about it then,” said the Ukrainian technical leader.

In the following months, fundraising in the Ukrainian Silicon Valley community, contracts with the US Agency for International Development and European governments, and donations from SpaceX facilitated the transfer of thousands of Starlink units to Ukraine. The Ukrainian communications service soldier who was responsible for providing access to Starlink on the front lines and who asked to be referred to by his first name, Mykola, said: "This is the most important basis for communication on the battlefield."

peace plan

Initially, Musk showed unconditional support for the Ukrainians, reacting encouragingly as Mikhail Fedorov, Ukraine's minister of digital transformation, tweeted pictures of equipment in place. But as the war went on, SpaceX began to pull back on help.

“We are unable to continue donating terminals to Ukraine or funding existing terminals for an indefinite period of time,” SpaceX’s sales director told the Pentagon in a September 2022 letter.

Musk became increasingly concerned that his technology was being used for military purposes. That same month, at a conference in Aspen attended by representatives of business and politics, Musk even expressed his support for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“He was on stage and said, ‘We should negotiate. Putin wants peace—we must negotiate peace with Putin,” Reed Hoffman, who helped him launch PayPal, recalls Musk saying.

A week later, Musk tweeted a proposal for his own peace plan, calling for new referendums to redraw Ukraine's borders and give Russia control of Crimea, a semi-autonomous peninsula recognized by most countries, including the United States, as Ukrainian territory.

In later tweets, Musk portrayed an inevitable outcome in favor of Russia and attached maps that marked territories in eastern Ukraine that he claimed “prefer Russia.” Musk also polled his Twitter followers about the plan. Millions responded, with about sixty percent turning down his offer.

Disconnect communication

By then, Musk's sympathies were beginning to show on the battlefield as well. One day, Ukrainian forces advancing into the occupied areas in the south were suddenly unable to communicate.

“We were very close to the front line,” said communications soldier Nikolai. “We crossed that line and Starlink stopped working.” The consequences were immediate.

“Communication was interrupted, the units were isolated. When you advance, especially commanders need a constant flow of information from battalions. The commanders, risking themselves, had to drive up to the battlefield in order to be in radio range,” Nikolai noted. “It was chaos.”

Ukrainian émigrés who were raising funds for Starlink divisions started getting frantic calls. The tech lead recalls how a Ukrainian military official told him, "We need Elon now."

Another Ukrainian recalled how he was "woken up by a dozen calls that the fighters had lost contact and were forced to retreat." The Financial Times reported that the outages affected units in Kherson, Zaporozhye, Kharkiv, Donetsk and Lugansk. U.S. and Ukrainian officials said they believe SpaceX cut off geofencing communications by cordoning off access areas.

A senior Department of Defense official said: "We've had a whole series of meetings within the department to try to figure out what we can do about it." Musk's special role presented unfamiliar challenges, as did the government's role as mediator.

“It doesn’t look like we could hold him for breach of contract or anything like that,” the official continued. The Pentagon will need to strike a pact with SpaceX so that at least Musk "can't wake up one morning and just decide he doesn't want to do this anymore." Kahl added: “For us, it was a kind of way to support services throughout Ukraine. At the very least, it could stop Musk from turning everything off completely."

Contract for Musk

Typically, such negotiations are handled by the Pentagon's procurement department. But Musk has become more than just a trader like Boeing, Lockheed or other defense industry giants. On the phone with Musk from Paris, Kahl was respectful. According to unclassified conversation topics, he thanked Musk for his efforts in helping Ukraine, acknowledged the huge costs he had incurred, and asked for at least a few weeks to develop a contract.

Musk did not immediately agree.

“My conclusion was that he was nervous that Starlink’s involvement was increasingly seen by Russia as facilitating the Ukrainian military effort and was looking for a way to assuage Russia’s concerns,” Kahl said.

To the dismay of Pentagon officials, Musk said he spoke to Putin personally. Another source said Musk had made the same claim weeks before he tweeted his pro-Russian peace plan and said his consultations with the Kremlin were regular.

Musk said he looked at his laptop and could see "the whole war unfolding" through the Starlink activity map.

"It was about three minutes before he said, 'Well, I had a great conversation with Putin,'" a senior Defense Department official noted. “And we were horrified, saying that this was not good.”

Musk admitted that the vivid illustration of how technologies he developed for peaceful purposes is used for warfare made him think.

After a fifteen-minute conversation, he agreed to give the Pentagon more time—ultimately, after public criticism and with visible irritation, the billionaire abandoned his threats to cut off the service.

“To hell with this,” he wrote on Twitter. “Even though Starlink is still losing money and other companies are receiving billions of taxpayer dollars, we will simply continue to provide free funding to the Ukrainian government.” In June 2023, the Department of Defense announced it had reached an agreement with SpaceX.

Support for the oligarchs

The intervention of oligarchs and other financial circles in the fate of nations is nothing new. During World War I, J.P. Morgan lent huge sums to the Allied Powers; after that, John D. Rockefeller Jr. invested in the fledgling League of Nations. Investor George Soros's Open Society Foundation funded civil society reform in post-Soviet Europe, and casino mogul Sheldon Adelson funded the media in Israel as part of his support for Benjamin Netanyahu.

But Musk's influence is bolder and broader. There is little precedent for a civilian becoming the arbiter of a war between countries in such a detailed manner, or the degree of dependence that the US now has on Musk in areas ranging from the future of energy and transportation to geological exploration.

SpaceX is currently the only means by which NASA transports crew from the United States into space, and this situation will continue for at least another year. The government's plan to transition the auto industry to electric vehicles calls for increased access to charging stations along highways. But this rests on the actions of another Musk enterprise - Tesla. The automaker has seeded so much of the country with its own charging stations that US President Joe Biden's administration has slacked off on early push for a universal charging standard that Musk didn't like. Its stations are eligible for billions of dollars in subsidies, provided Tesla makes them compatible with a different charging standard.

Over the past two decades, amid crumbling infrastructure and declining trust in institutions, Musk has sought business opportunities in critical areas where the state has retreated after decades of privatization. The government now relies on him, but has difficulty responding to his risk-taking, brinkmanship and whims.

Current and former officials from NASA, the Departments of Defense, Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration say Musk's influence has become inevitable in their work, and some of them believe that he is now some kind of unelected official. A Pentagon official said he was keeping Musk updated on inquiries about his role in Ukraine and would only interview an official about it with Musk's permission.

"We'll talk to you if Elon wants to," he told Farrow. Musk was asked in an interview last year on a podcast if he has more influence than the US government. He immediately replied, "In a way."

Power Mask

Musk's power continues to grow. His acquisition of Twitter, which he renamed X, gives him a critical forum for political discourse ahead of the next presidential election. He recently founded an AI company, a move that was the result of many years of involvement with the technology. Musk has become an overly exposed figure in pop culture, and his abrupt transitions from altruism to vanity, from strategic to impulsive, have been the subject of countless articles and at least seven major books, including an upcoming biography of Walter Isaacson. But the nature and extent of his power is less widely studied.

More than thirty current and former colleagues of Musk in various industries and many people from his personal life told Farrow about their experiences with him. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, with whom Musk has worked and communicated, said: “Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can save him."

Starlink deal

The terms of the Starlink deal were not disclosed. Ukrainian officials say they have not experienced further service disruptions. But Musk continues to be ambivalent about how the technology is used and where it can be deployed. In February, he wrote: "We will not allow an escalation of the conflict that could lead to a Third World War." He said he was sincerely trying to sort out the moral dilemmas of his role: "We try our best to do the right thing, while 'the right thing to do' is an extremely difficult moral issue."

Musk's hesitation is in line with his pragmatic interests. The Shanghai plant makes half of all Tesla vehicles, and Musk is dependent on the goodwill of Chinese officials who have backed Russia in the conflict. Musk recently admitted to the Financial Times that Beijing does not approve of his decision to provide Internet services to Ukraine and demanded assurances that he would not introduce such technology in China. In the same interview, he answered questions about China's efforts to take control of Taiwan by passing another peace plan. He suggested that Taiwan could become a jointly controlled administrative zone, which Taiwanese leaders believed would end the country's independence. On a trip to Beijing this spring, Musk was greeted with what Reuters called “flattering and feasting.” He met with senior officials, including China's foreign minister, and posed for official photos with a smile more typical of world leaders.

Homeland security officials Farrow spoke to had different views on the balance of power between the government and Musk. He maintains good relations with some of them, including General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Since the two met several years ago, when Milley was Army chief of staff, they have discussed “the application of technology in warfare—artificial intelligence, electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles,” Milley said. “He has insight that has helped shape my thinking about fundamentally changing the nature of war and modernizing the U.S. military.”

During the Starlink controversy, Musk called him for advice. However, other officials expressed deep concerns.

“Living in the world we live in, in which Elon runs this company and this is a private business under his control, we live off his good graces,” a Pentagon spokesman said.

The rise of Elon Musk

Musk was born in 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa's administrative capital, and he, his younger brother Kimbal, and his younger sister Tosca grew up under apartheid. Musk's mother, May, a Canadian model and dietitian, and his father, Errol, an engineer, divorced when he was young and the children initially stayed with May.

By the mid-eighties, Musk moved in with his father, a decision he says was motivated by concerns about his father's loneliness and one he regretted. Musk, usually unemotional in interviews, wept openly as he told Rolling Stone magazine about the years that followed, during which he said his father subjected him to psychological torture in ways he declined to elaborate on.

“You have no idea how bad it is,” he said. “He committed almost every crime you can think of.” He has done almost every evil you can think of."

Over time, Musk moved into science fiction and video games.

“One of the reasons I got into technology, maybe the reason itself, was video games,” he said at a gaming industry convention a few years ago. In his early teens, Musk wrote an eight-bit Space Invaders-style shooter titled Blastar, romantically credited on the title screen as "E. R. Musk. The premise was simple: "Mission: Destroy an alien cargo ship carrying deadly H-bombs and status beam vehicles." But it won recognition from a South African professional magazine, which published one hundred and sixty-seven lines of the game's code and paid Musk a small sum.

In 1995, in the early days of the World Wide Web, he and Kimball founded a company called Zip2, an online urban directory that they sold to newspapers. Eventually, the company's investors stripped him of his leadership role and appointed a more experienced CEO. Musk believed that the startup needed to focus not only on newspapers, but also on consumers. Instead, investors stuck to a more modest vision. In 1999, Zip2 was sold to Compaq for $307 million, netting Musk over $20 million.

After Musk left Zip2, he invested about $12 million, most of his fortune, in another startup, an online bank called X.com. In 2000, X.com merged with rival online payments startup Confinity, co-founded by entrepreneur Peter Thiel. Musk and Thiel fought for control of the company. Two years later, eBay acquired what was then PayPal for $1,5 billion, making Musk, who remained the largest shareholder, fabulously wealthy.

SpaceX

Of all Musk's ventures, SpaceX perhaps most fundamentally reflects his risk-taking. Employees at the SpaceX Starship complex in Boca Chica, Texas, spent December 2020 preparing to launch a rocket known as SN8, the latest prototype in the company's Starship program, which they hope will eventually carry humans into orbit around the moon.

Musk has been obsessed with space since childhood. The idea for SpaceX came about after he was fired from PayPal.

“I went to the NASA website to see the schedule for when we should go to Mars,” Musk said in 2012. “At first I thought, ‘God, maybe I’m just looking in the wrong place. Why was there no plan, no schedule? There was nothing there."

In 2001, he contacted space exploration enthusiasts and even traveled to Russia in an unsuccessful attempt to buy rockets to use. The following year, he moved to Los Angeles, close to California's aerospace industry, and eventually assembled a team of engineers and entrepreneurs and founded SpaceX to make his own rockets.

Private rocket launches date back to the 2008s, but no one has done anything on the scale Musk envisioned, and it turned out to be harder and more expensive than he expected. Musk stated that by XNUMX the company was nearly bankrupt and that, having invested most of his fortune in SpaceX and Tesla, he was not far behind.

“It was definitely the worst year of my life,” he said.

The first three SpaceX launches failed, and there was no budget for another one.

“I didn’t have any more money,” Musk said several years later. “We were able to collect enough spare parts for the fourth launch.” If it had failed, he added, "SpaceX would have died."

The launch was successful, and NASA soon awarded SpaceX a $1,6 billion resupply contract to the International Space Station. In 2020, the company flew its first manned mission there, ending America's nearly decade-long reliance on Russian spacecraft to carry out the task.

SpaceX is now launching more satellites than any other private company, with four thousand five hundred and nineteen satellites in orbit as of July, occupying many of the Earth's orbital routes.

Even Musk's critics acknowledge that his penchant for overcoming limitations helped catalyze SpaceX's success. A number of officials have suggested that despite the tensions associated with the company, it has made the government bureaucracy more flexible.

However, some in the aerospace world, even those who believe Musk's rockets are safe in principle, fear that the concentration of so much power in private companies with so few restrictions will lead to tragedy.

Problems with Tesla

In early 2022, Stephen Cliff, then deputy administrator of the Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, learned that potentially tens of thousands of Tesla vehicles had a feature he thought was of concern. For years, Tesla has been working on a fully self-driving car, Musk's longtime ambition.

Now, Cliff has been told that a version of Tesla's software is Full Self-Driving (an experimental feature that allows cars to navigate with minimal driver intervention and drive through stop signs at about 6 miles (9,6 km) per hour). It was clearly illegal.

Cliff's team reached out to Tesla, and several meetings played out an amazing conversation about security and artificial intelligence. Tesla representatives looked confused. Their response, Cliff recalled, was: “It's something people do all the time. Show us the data why it's not safe." Officials told Tesla that, regardless of the individual's consent, "you shouldn't be able to program a computer to break the law for you." They demanded that Tesla update all electric vehicles by removing this feature.

Musk joined Tesla as an investor in 2004, a year after it was incorporated.

Tesla has repeatedly said that autopilot, a more limited technology than full self-driving, is safer than a human driver. Musk said last year that he would be "shocked" if autopilot wasn't safer than human drivers by the end of the year. But he never made public the data needed to fully substantiate these claims.

In recent months, new data on traffic accidents has shown an increase in the number of accidents (including fatalities) using autopilot. Tesla hides details. Pete Buttigieg, head of the Department of Transportation, recently said there were "concerns" about autopilot. Cliff said he saw data that showed Tesla vehicles were involved in "a disproportionate number of accidents involving ambulances," although he noted that the agency had not yet determined whether the cause was technology or human drivers.

Officials who worked for Osha and a similar California agency said Musk's influence and attitude toward regulation made their job difficult. The Biden administration, which is urgently trying to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, has come to the conclusion that it needs to work with Musk because of his dominance in the electric vehicle market. And Musk's personal wealth eclipses the entire budget of Osha, which is tasked with monitoring conditions at his workplaces.

Politics and Twitter

For most of his public life, Musk has positioned himself as a centrist. “Socially, I’m very liberal,” he said in 2020. “Economically, he’s right-of-center, maybe, or a centrist.”

According to him, he made a donation to Hillary Clinton and voted for both her and Joe Biden. But in recent years a more radical view has come to the fore. In March 2022, Twitter suspended the account of the satirical website Babylon Bee after the site misidentified a government official's gender.

The following week, Musk polled his followers about whether Twitter respected free speech, and in a phone call with the CEO of Babylon Bee, he joked about buying the platform. Finally, in April 2022, he offered $44 billion for the company. Almost immediately, he tried to pull out of the deal, prompting Twitter to take legal action. After months of litigation, Musk resumed the acquisition process and took control of the company in October.

“Given the unprovoked attacks on me from leading Democrats and the very cold attitude towards Tesla and SpaceX, I intend to vote Republican in November,” he wrote on Twitter last year. By the time Musk bought Twitter, he was urging his followers to vote the same way and apparently supported Ron DeSantis, whom he helped nominate.

Although Musk's teenage daughter, Vivian, has declared herself transgender, he has supported anti-transgender sentiment by saying he will lobby for the criminalization of "irreversible" gender-affirming childcare. Musk began spreading disinformation on the platform: He shared theories that the physical attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of the former Speaker of the House of Representatives, happened after an encounter with a male prostitute, and retweeted speculation that messages accurately identifying the mass shooter as white supremacist were "psychopathic". Some people who know Musk well still find it difficult to understand the meaning of his political shift.

When Musk came to Twitter, he immediately gutted the company's staff, cutting the number of employees by about 50%. One of those who retained his position was Yoel Roth, the company's head of trust and safety. Roth, who is in his thirties, is gay, Jewish and liberal.

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But once Musk took office, he resisted calls to fire Roth. “We've all made questionable tweets, me more than anyone, but I want to make it clear that I support Yoel,” he tweeted in October 2022. “I think he is very honest and we all have the right to our political opinions.”

But the cuts Musk imposed quickly hurt the company. Employees were informed of their layoffs via scathing, depersonalized emails, and the remaining employees were abruptly told to return to work in the office.

This summer, Twitter's cheerful blue bird logo descended from the roof of the company's San Francisco headquarters and was replaced with a flashing X.

Twitter is now a private company, so it's hard to gauge its finances, but many big-name advertisers have left, and Meta recently launched Threads, a competitor that shamelessly emulates the old Twitter and has broken user numbers. Musk threatened to sue and then challenged Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Meta, to a cage fight, promising to livestream and donate the proceeds to charity.

Some of Musk's associates have linked his erratic behavior to attempts to self-medicate. Musk, who says he now spends most of his time in a modest home in the South Texas wetlands close to SpaceX, admitted in an interview last year: "I feel pretty lonely."

He said his career has been one of "big highs, terrible lows and relentless stress". One close colleague remarked, “His life just sucks. It's such a stress. He is so dedicated to these companies. He falls asleep and wakes up answering emails. Ninety-nine percent of people will never know someone so obsessed and with such a high tolerance for personal sacrifice."

XAI

On July 12, Musk announced xAI, his entry into the field of artificial intelligence that promises to change life as we know it.

The entrepreneur has been involved in artificial intelligence for many years. In 2015, he was one of the few technology leaders to fund OpenAI, then a non-profit initiative.

OpenAI had a less grandiose and more cautious mission statement than xAI: "to advance digital intelligence in a way that is most likely to benefit humanity." In the first few years of OpenAI's existence, Musk grew dissatisfied with the company. He said his AI efforts at Tesla created a conflict of interest.

It's hard to say whether Musk's interest in AI was driven by scientific wonder and altruism or a desire to dominate a new and potentially powerful industry. Several entrepreneurs who co-founded the business with Musk have suggested that Google and Microsoft's entry into the field has made it a new frontier, just as spaceships and electric cars used to be. Musk says he is driven by fear of the technology's disruptive potential.

In March, the billionaire, along with dozens of tech leaders, signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause in advanced artificial intelligence development.

However, when Musk called for a pause, he was working on xAI by hiring from major competitors, including OpenAI, and even, according to a person familiar with the conversation, contacting the leadership of Nvidia, the dominant chip maker used in AI.

In the month that the letter was circulated, Musk completed the registration of xAI.

The AI ​​research and development already underway at Tesla, and the data mine Musk now manages thanks to his Twitter purchase, give him some edge in the industry.

The open letter, along with questions about the apocalyptic potential of artificial intelligence, also asked about the sectors of government and industry that Musk has shaped. “Should we risk losing control of our civilization? he wrote with his fellow entrepreneurs. “Such decisions should not be delegated to unelected technology leaders.”

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