I saw a few people praising this story on X today so I read it expecting it to be another Musk hit piece. I guess author Ronan Farrow wants it to be that but I’m not sure he really succeeded. The gist of the story is that Musk is really rich and, because of the success of his companies, has a lot of say when it comes to the use of his technology. Case in point, Starlink satellite communications which Musk donated to Ukraine early after the invasion.

Initially, Musk showed unreserved support for the Ukrainian cause, responding encouragingly as Mykhailo Fedorov, the Ukrainian minister for digital transformation, tweeted pictures of equipment in the field. But, as the war ground on, SpaceX began to balk at the cost. “We are not in a position to further donate terminals to Ukraine, or fund the existing terminals for an indefinite period of time,” SpaceX’s director of government sales told the Pentagon in a letter, last September. (CNBC recently valued SpaceX at nearly a hundred and fifty billion dollars. Forbes estimated Musk’s personal net worth at two hundred and twenty billion dollars, making him the world’s richest man.)

Musk was also growing increasingly uneasy with the fact that his technology was being used for warfare. That month, at a conference in Aspen attended by business and political figures, Musk even appeared to express support for Vladimir Putin. “He was onstage, and he said, ‘We should be negotiating. Putin wants peace—we should be negotiating peace with Putin,’ ” Reid Hoffman, who helped start PayPal with Musk, recalled. Musk seemed, he said, to have “bought what Putin was selling, hook, line, and sinker.” A week later, Musk tweeted a proposal for his own peace plan, which called for new referendums to redraw the borders of Ukraine, and granted Russia control of Crimea, the semi-autonomous peninsula recognized by most nations, including the United States, as Ukrainian territory. In later tweets, Musk portrayed as inevitable an outcome favoring Russia and attached maps highlighting eastern Ukrainian territories, some of which, he argued, “prefer Russia.” Musk also polled his Twitter followers about the plan. Millions responded, with about sixty per cent rejecting the proposal.

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I support Ukraine and, more than that, I support the US sending money and arms to Ukraine to push Russia back beyond its own borders. So I disagree with Musk’s change of heart on this issue. Like a lot of other people he was making noise for a while about the possibility of nuclear war which struck me as nothing more than Russian propaganda hitting its mark.

So I completely disagree with Musk on this, and yet that doesn’t change the fact that it’s his company which means he can offer or withdraw its services as he sees fit. Farrow seems to want to imply that its frightening to have one man with so much power but what’s the alternative. Starlink exists because Musk’s company created it and his other company put those satellites in orbit. Is Farrow suggesting the government should take it away from him because it’s too important for him to own? He doesn’t say that of course but that’s sort of the gist of much of his article. He quotes an unnamed Pentagon official who says it outright.

“Living in the world we live in, in which Elon runs this company and it is a private business under his control, we are living off his good graces,” a Pentagon official told me. “That sucks.”

Too bad. Musk is in control of this because, as the Pentagon understood, it had no contract with Musk.

The senior defense official said, “We had a whole series of meetings internal to the department to try to figure out what we could do about this.” Musk’s singular role presented unfamiliar challenges, as did the government’s role as intermediary. “It wasn’t like we could hold him in breach of contract or something,” the official continued. The Pentagon would need to reach a contractual arrangement with SpaceX so that, at the very least, Musk “couldn’t wake up one morning and just decide, like, he didn’t want to do this anymore.” Kahl added, “It was kind of a way for us to lock in services across Ukraine. It could at least prevent Musk from turning off the switch altogether.”

Musk’s demand that the defense department pay him for the ongoing use of the satellites doesn’t strike me as an outrage. If the US government wanted to send planes built by Boeing to Ukraine to bolster the war effort it wouldn’t expect Boeing to send them for free. They are a real company that can’t afford to simply donate its very expensive products wherever the Pentagon feels they are needed. Starlink is the same. Eventually, Musk did come around:

After a fifteen-minute call, Musk agreed to give the Pentagon more time. He also, after public blowback and with evident annoyance, walked back his threats to cut off service. “The hell with it,” he tweeted. “Even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free.” This June, the Department of Defense announced that it had reached a deal with SpaceX.

Again, in my view, Musk took a wrong turn for a while there and eventually did the right thing. But the DOD had no claim over Musk or his companies. If it wanted to guarantee the extensive use of Starlink in Ukraine it needed to pay for that.

The rest of the article seems to devoted to the idea that Musk likes to take risks. This is something that anyone who has watched one of his product rollouts or interviews could have told you. This is the guy who introduced the Cybertruck by breaking its windows with a large steel ball bearing. He’s the guy who introduced his new line of robots by joking that he would make them slow enough that people could outrun them if they became murderous terminators. He’s the guy who launched the biggest rocked ever built saying there was a better than even chance it would clear the launchpad but everything after that was uncertain. In general, he’s just not playing the same game that other CEOs are playing and it shows. I did like this story about his childhood which I hadn’t heard before.

One summer evening in the mid-nineteen-eighties, Musk and his friend Theo Taoushiani took Taoushiani’s father’s car for an illicit drive. Musk and Taoushiani were both in their mid-teens, and lived about a mile apart in a suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa. Neither had a driver’s license, or permission from Taoushiani’s father. But they were passionate Dungeons & Dragons fans, and a new module—a fresh scenario in the game—had just been released. Taoushiani took the wheel for the twenty-minute drive to the Sandton City mall. “Elon was my co-pilot,”  Taoushiani told me. “We went under the cover of darkness.” At the mall, they found that they didn’t have enough money. But Musk promised a salesperson that they would return the next day with the rest, and dropped the name of a well-known Greek restaurant owned by Taoushiani’s family. “Elon had the gift of the gab,” Taoushiani said. “He’s very persuasive, and he’s quite dogged in his determination.” The two went home with the module.

Elon is a very clever nerd who doesn’t have a lot of patience for moving at the speed of government regulation. This may make him difficult and even somewhat reckless at times but it also means he gets things done while everyone else seems to be moving in slow motion trying to catch up.

His brand of initiative and boldness is something we used to value in America but it feels like now we have a lot more critics whose contribution is to scold anyone who takes an actual risk that hasn’t been approved by a government committee. Elon may be a mess in a lot of ways personally and professionally. He may literally blow up the launch pad when he launches his giant new rocket the first time. Still, I’m glad he’s building those rockets and pushing those boundaries here in America rather than somewhere else.