Musk isn’t a military strategist or a seasoned diplomat. His genius lies elsewhere.
We have, to my mind anyway, extremely welcome news that President Trump called Elon Musk and prevailed on him to restore full functionality of Starlink/Starshield for the Ukrainian military. It gets to what I wrote about in my piece on the homepage today — that a number of factors conspired to make it unlikely that the administration could maintain its latest apparent shift away from Ukraine and toward Russia.
But the reporting seems to confirm that it was Musk’s initial call to hobble access (whether it was made with or without White House blessing is less clear).
And that’s still troubling.
Musk has been all over the place on Ukraine. Two days after the Russian invasion in 2022, Ukrainian officials begged Musk on Twitter to provide Starlink access, and Musk responded almost instantly: “Starlink service is now active in Ukraine. More terminals en route.” This probably did no less than save the country. The system became the very backbone of Ukrainian military operations, used for command-and-control, intelligence transmission, artillery targeting, drone operations, and air defense.
Then something changed in the fall of 2022: Ukraine took the offensive, liberating vast swaths of occupied territory and, more consequentially, prompting mobilization and nuclear saber-rattling from Vladimir Putin. This clearly spooked Musk, who frankly overrated the threats (along with plenty of people inside the Biden administration and the commentariat, myself included). Emanations from Russia that commerical infrastructure supporting Ukraine could become military targets surely didn’t help.
So Musk seems to have ordered the shutdown of Starlink terminals along the line of contest, with something like a hundred terminals affected. It interrupted the counteroffensive and may have cost Ukraine territory at the margins, but service was eventually restored for reasons that never became clear. Later in 2022, Musk also refused a request to activate Starlink coverage over Crimea to facilitate a Ukrainian attack on the Black Sea Fleet. And SpaceX subsequently restricted offensive military applications of Starlink, including operations inside Russia, the status quo we have more or less been under until the events of the last week.
The recent service interruptions, and the ones of almost exactly four years ago, both came at times when it was clear momentum was shifting in Ukraine’s favor and when Russia, feeling this pain, did what Russia always does and escalated threats and hybrid action against Ukraine’s Western backers. One could say simply that Russia’s strategy seems to have worked on Musk in both instances, at least temporarily.
But at the same time, Musk has been openly pessimistic about Ukraine’s military prospects from the start. That pessimism informed long stretches, notably when Russia was back on the front foot in recent years, where his thinking was that American assistance would merely prolong an unwinnable war of attrition: “This spending does not help Ukraine — prolonging the war does not help Ukraine.”
Musk seems to sincerely share the view espoused by Western doves, retrenchers, and Kremlin apologists alike that ending the killing takes precedence over the justice of the peace that follows. Musk’s own October 2022 peace proposal would have recognized Russian sovereignty over Crimea, imposed permanent Ukrainian neutrality, and subjected occupied territories to new referendums. It was, he insisted, “just a question of how many die before then.” By March 2025, he was explicitly assigning moral responsibility for the deaths to Zelensky, calling his continued resistence “cruel and inhumane.” Earlier this month, Musk returned to the theme: “And so the slaughter continues. . . . Time for Zelensky to go.”
It’s difficult to square these two things — Musk’s stated belief that Ukrainian self-defense is itself immoral because of how much Ukrainian suffering it involves, and his habit of hobbling Ukraine when Russia is at its most vulnerable — without concluding that Musk is actually just in the tank for the Kremlin. But it’s difficult to square that conclusion, in turn, with all Musk has done for Ukraine, initially at his own expense and peril.
Which is why I think he’s just genuinely morally confused. That’s not an excuse, but an explanation. Musk isn’t a military strategist or a seasoned diplomat. His genius lies elsewhere, and he didn’t ask to have his technology at the center of the most consequential war of the 21st century. He’s also, at this point, a famed vacillator on topics ranging from Twitter bans to Donald Trump. So it shouldn’t surprise, even if it disappoints, that he’d vacillate on Ukraine over the course of the sturm und drang. That’s why I’m very grateful that a man of Musk’s talents is a patriotic American and very glad that he’s not where the buck stops on national security policy.