Walter Isaacson’s highly anticipated biography on Elon Musk is hitting shelves on Tuesday — and he is already walking back a major claim.
Isaacson reported in his book that Musk had abruptly turned off Ukraine’s access to his Starlink satellite internet system last year just as the country was launching an underwater drone attack on a Russian fleet in Crimea, depriving the Eastern European country’s forces of critical communications for the assault and rendering the offensive a failure.
“He secretly told his engineers to turn off coverage within 100 kilometers of the Crimean coast,” fearing the sneak attack would lead to a “mini-Pearl Harbor” scenario and nuclear war, Isaacson wrote in the book, according to an excerpt obtained and first reported by CNN. “As a result, when the Ukrainian drone subs got near the Russian fleet in Sevastopol, they lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly.”
That explosive claim, which set off alarms and triggered a tsunami of questions about Musk’s role as a key figure potentially determining the fate of Vladimir Putin’s ruthless war, turned out not to be quite as Isaacson had told it. Musk pushed back last week, writing on X that Starlink was never activated over Crimea and that he had actually received “an emergency request from government authorities” to enable the service, with the “obvious intent being to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor.”
“If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation,” Musk wrote.
Perhaps more importantly, Isaacson subsequently walked back the bombshell claim, which had received significant media coverage and was published as an “untold story” book excerpt in The Washington Post.
Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/11/media/walter-isaacson-elon-musk-reliable-sources/index.html