Elon Musk stated that Starlink restricted Ukraine’s access to high speed because its military was using it for offensive attacks. This justification is ironic: Ukraine, to defend itself against a Russian invasion that targets civilians, hired Starlink to replace its infrastructure destroyed by Russian missiles. Donald Trump and Musk are taking advantage of the situation to blame Ukrainian attacks on refineries for the rise in diesel ahead of the November US election, pretending that the real culprit for the energy spike is not Trump’s conflict with Iran.
This dynamic illustrates that the fragile alliance between Trump and Musk is not to be trusted and does not bode well for humanity. Musk is the richest individual in the world thanks to lucrative contracts with the United States government. This raises a critical question: How does Congress allow one man to play God and decide who wins a war, when it’s taxpayer dollars that make Starlink viable?
How Congress allows one man to play God
Musk’s claim that “SpaceX has done more than anyone else to defend Ukraine” is an insult. Ukraine pays for the service; no corporation should be able to unilaterally alter the quality of a contract for political whims. Ukraine is a customer and service must be constant. period
Humanity faces a crisis by allowing a manipulative individual with a political agenda like Musk to control strategic communication systems. But the problem goes further. A handful of tech CEOs – like xAI (Musk again), Anthropic and Google – are unilaterally dictating the pace of artificial intelligence when many sages warn that an unregulated AI race is an existential threat.
Society and politicians must act to reduce the threat of technological oligarchs playing with our collective future. Congress must act urgently to strip them of absolute control, ensuring that the future of AI is governed by independent experts and not by the millionaires who profit from it.
