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.
When you’re a star they let you do it.
Musk’s whole “slash government spending” schtick is such a farce. Tesla wouldn’t have domestic manufacturing facilities without a DOE loan. SpaceX survives off of government contracts.
Slash government funding for everything except the socialism for the rich.
Oh that never includes the donor class.
The NPR article goes into this. Elon likely will award himself money without oversight while cutting programs like NPR and the SEC and other regulatory bodies etc.
Slash Social Security, add EV subsidies, make them so that only Tesla qualifies in practice.
Hilarious that his administration is already leaking worse than a Russian submarine.
This is bad
Not a surprise knowing Trump these days.
Doesn’t he have like ten companies to run… into the ground?
The companies might do better if he’s there less to make decisions for them.
hasnt musk given his starlink crap to the russian military?
Since when do we allow regular civilians to participate in diplomatic calls?
When you have a president that dgaf about anything saying otherwise.
It’s beyond naive to call Elon a regular civilian
Yeah, he’s an illegal immigrant, get it right.
My point was to point out he’s not part of the government
Neither is Trump. However Elon can still become part of Trump’s future cabinet.
True, haven’t thought about Trump not being part of the government yet. I would hope some restrictions would apply if Musk becomes part of it (conflict of interest wise)
It’s almost like a member of Trump’s cabinet was sentenced to prison for doing that exact thing between Trump’s 2016 election and taking office.
Yeah but for people to know that would require actually understanding the impeachment proceeding and prior/subsequent investigations.
I think we all know how that went.
Since they have over $200 billion dollars
So pay to play is back.
It left?
Since the US bacame an oligarchy.
I guess we now know who will really hold power in the oval office. Spoiler: it’s not Trump
Fucker will disable Starlink in Ukraine and allow it in Russia
He’s already done so, actually. Under the guise of “blackouts”.
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.
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.
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!
They’ll finance it with debt, sale of assets and cutting of services. Which is probably even worse
Biggest case of conflict of interest and quid pro quo in government and its just being allowed to happen…
Didn’t he do that already?
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.
US sanctions may try to stop Russia from using statlink, but they’re using it anyway.
Plus the fact that Musk regularly talks with Putin really makes this whole thing quack and waddle.
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.
I wonder if this will make it into the Senate Confirmation Hearings when Trump makes him Secretary of Making Things Worse Before They Get Better. (Or maybe they are smart enough to not give him a job that requires Congressional approval…)
What a dilema for Ukraine! I feel their abandonment will be a microcosm for our leaving to the wolves.
I think a lot of Americans don’t understand that the USA hedgemony isn’t a divine right, it was a deliberate construction with tacit agreement of convenience from the western world.
Much like an economy, belief makes it so.
Much like the UK’s arrogance has driven them into geopolitical obscurity, so will the USA’s.
In 15 years, Americans are going to wake up and realize that their voices are irrelevant in the world. I don’t know how y’all are going to handle it.
I deeply, desperately hope you’re right. In the best case, the military (including the nuclear arsenal) gets as hollowed out as russias before that realization comes.
The USA became dominant by letting the world fight itself to ruins, then entering into the war late and declaring victory. TWICE.
Being the only mostly undestroyed nation after a world war is immensely profitable.
This is true.
I’m going to be bummed, but it’ll be deserved. Maybe future generations will stop being entitled assholes. Idk. Don’t want to live in a disintegrating country. Really don’t want my kids to. But I guess we don’t always get to pick.
Maybe future generations will stop being entitled assholes.
Look what’s happening with Gen Z right now. They showed a lot of promise, then showed up to vote and turns out they have just as many nazis as the rest of us. We’re going ride this death spiral all the way to extinction.
Not Gen Z girls
Wheeeeee…
Look at all this fun I’m having.
Hedge money
Ukraine is f*cked now and soon Europe too.
Technically, a lot of NATO countries still have nukes. So they might be half as fucked.
“Look honey, the clown show already started.”
So Trump and Vance are outsourcing their jobs to Musk…?
