Elon and Ukraine

[trayloader]

Forget my last post. Herr Musk showed his human side and will continue Starlink support.
That move will go down in history!

While in Putin Land things might not go so well.
The „Head of Mobilisation“ bit the dust:

'Suspicious' death of Putin mobilisation chief as tyrant calls off plans

ONE of Vladimir Putin’s mobilisation chiefs has been found dead in “suspicious” circumstances prompting a murder investigation. The body of Lt-Col Roman Malyk, 49, was discovered near the fence of …

www.thesun.co.uk

 

[ElectricIAC]

Forget my last post. Herr Musk showed his human side and will continue Starlink support.

While in Putin Land things might not go so well.
The „Head of Mobilisation“ bit the dust:

'Suspicious' death of Putin mobilisation chief as tyrant calls off plans

ONE of Vladimir Putin’s mobilisation chiefs has been found dead in “suspicious” circumstances prompting a murder investigation. The body of Lt-Col Roman Malyk, 49, was discovered near the fence of …

www.thesun.co.uk

Cute Elon joke. Keep it up….

You gotta though wonder how many of these guys are just faking their deaths and defecting.

 

[Beltsbear]

No, it's the right thing to do for the Pentagon to support this unique capability.

the truth lies in the middle. Elon vastly exaggerated the cost at $4500 per month per terminal. The pentagon should pay for service, around $500 a month per terminal plus the cost of any new terminals needed.

 

[SmokyPeat]

No, it's the right thing to do for the Pentagon to support this unique capability.

Absolutely. Apparently Elon also sees SpaceX supporting Starlink service for Ukraine as the right thing to do if govt. support is not forthcoming. I agree.

 

[mongo]

the truth lies in the middle. Elon vastly exaggerated the cost at $4500 per month per terminal. The pentagon should pay for service, around $500 a month per terminal plus the cost of any new terminals needed.

They are using more data than typical residental or business customer. If residental is $60, $4,500 is a bargain for 100 times the data.

SpaceX is not asking to recoup past expenses, but also cannot fund the existing system indefinitely *and* send several thousand more terminals that have data usage up to 100X greater than typical households. This is unreasonable.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1580802376973230080

 

[JRP3]

Elon tweeted that he's going to continue funding Starlink service for Ukraine, even though it's a drag on SpaceX finances. Because it's the right thing to do. Good for him!

Too bad he made it look as if he was doing the wrong thing first. Now of course people will think he's caving to pressure.

 

[Knightshade]

It just doesn't compute for someone who is being celebrated for his heroic effort saving the kids to just go completely off the deep end as if Elon slept with his wife. I don't like conspiracy theories but if you were to tell me that was scripted, then it'll compute much better for me.

As for Elons response, I am not on the spectrum nor am I under great stress due to Tesla collapsing at the time, so I am not going sit here pretending I can be a better person if I were him. But at least Elons response had a motive and can be explained in a coherent manner.

So... it does not compute that submarine guy said something mean and maybe it's a scripted conspiracy.

But when Elon reponds to them with something far meaner, well, who are you to judge what he said? And the only justification for this difference you offer is... "the other guy started it"?

That is... not a great argument.

 

[Runarbt]

This is pretty cool:View attachment 864216

I know if they started a Go Fund Me page, I would definitely contribute as I would know my money is going to the defense of Ukraine!

I was thinking some over priced Spacex merchandise with Ukraine themes.;-)

 

[bxr140]

Well, now he's really stepped in it. Can you imagine the level of hate Elon with get for this?

Of course, can you imagine how well this plays in Elon’s Court of Public Opinion?

 

[Doggydogworld]

They are using more data than typical residental or business customer. If residental is $60, $4,500 is a bargain for 100 times the data.

1. 100x is a MuskStat
2. That's not how volume pricing scales
3. .... especially for a system that's primarily fixed cost
4. There is a separate thread for Elon, Starlink and Ukraine discussion

 

[wipster]

I was thinking some over priced Spacex merchandise with Ukraine themes.;-)

I would buy a 4' high one of these:

 

[STS-134]

Too bad he made it look as if he was doing the wrong thing first. Now of course people will think he's caving to pressure.

For all we know, this could have been what happened. Someone in the government could have called Elon and reminded him just how much the government was paying SpaceX for its contracts. They could have said, we can pay for Starlink and reduce the amount we pay for future SpaceX contracts, or we'll add the cost of the Starlink service to the SpaceX contracts and you provide the service for "free", and get the free advertising and good will. Your choice. And if you ever tweet that this conversation took place, we do the former and not the latter, or SpaceX eats the costs.

 

[JRP3]

People here need to realize that Elon/SpaceX is up against one of the best propaganda machines in the world. Russian military and government are experts at taking down opponents through media. The oil/gas industry propaganda was bad enough, but now he has military grade propaganda aimed at him. Keep that in mind when reading any anti-Elon or SpaceX information.

All you need to read is Elon. He's quite good at making himself look bad time and time again.

 

[ElectricIAC]

For all we know, this could have been what happened. Someone in the government could have called Elon and reminded him just how much the government was paying SpaceX for its contracts. They could have said, we can pay for Starlink and reduce the amount we pay for future SpaceX contracts, or we'll add the cost of the Starlink service to the SpaceX contracts and you provide the service for "free", and get the free advertising and good will. Your choice. And if you ever tweet that this conversation took place, we do the former and not the latter, or SpaceX eats the costs.

Sounds like the conversation they had with MBS if that’s the case.

Before MBS told Joey to pound sand publicly that is.

 

[stopcrazypp]

I think we're too much focussed on the Twitter universe. It is not representative of society. The loudest and often most obnoxious people use Twitter (they think their opinion is very important and needs to be heard), but most of society never reads anything on Twitter.

I think we're also too much focussed on the impact of what Elon tweets on the rest of society. What he says is much less controversial on the right side of the political spectrum than on the left side.

And I believe we're too much focussed on western society itself. We fear what potential Tesla buyers in the West might think of Elon and Tesla. But we don't realise that we he said on Ukraine (but also Taiwan) is well received in China, Tesla's second most important market.

The fact that many of us are active on Twitter, lean to the left and live in the West makes us overestimate the negative impact of his tweets.

You are treating Twitter as if it is a closed forum when it is very much open and Elon has an account that has one of the most followers. His comments are all over the mainstream media (even my parents who use no social media have heard of his comments). You are way underestimating the impact his comments had. This is not even touching on what the US government might be thinking now (is Elon and SpaceX going to remain a reliable partner to the US military and space program, or should the US government start looking for more alternatives).

As for the Taiwan comment, that was not made on Twitter, that was made to Financial Times. The initial response actually by the Chinese government was that Elon should shut up about what they consider their internal affairs:

China and Taiwan want Elon Musk to keep his opinions to himself

Taiwan officials argued that Musk cannot offer an objective perspective on the conflict due to his business interests in China.

www.businessinsider.com

They only backtracked later when they found it matches their own narrative:

China Hails Elon Musk’s Proposal for Taiwan Unification

China heaped praise on Elon Musk’s plan for a Hong Kong-like system for Taiwan, despite declining support for unification on the island as Beijing ramps up military pressure.

www.bloomberg.com

As for what the Chinese people think, they aren't blind to the fact that Elon has lots of business interests in mainland China (neither are people in Taiwan or the west).

 

[mongo]

1. 100x is a MuskStat
2. That's not how volume pricing scales
3. .... especially for a system that's primarily fixed cost
4. There is a separate thread for Elon, Starlink and Ukraine discussion

1. Yes, anywhere else to get Starlink usage data?

2. We're not talking a normal product, for example, electricity costs are is linear to increasing on the high end of usage
3. Data backhaul is not free, nor are ground links. If the data were all terminal to terminal via laser link, that would be flat, but still capped by capacity.
4. Yep, but wanted to address poster where they would see it

 

[Singuy]

So... it does not compute that submarine guy said something mean and maybe it's a scripted conspiracy.

But when Elon reponds to them with something far meaner, well, who are you to judge what he said? And the only justification for this difference you offer is... "the other guy started it"?

That is... not a great argument.

Oh absolutely. I have never seen anyone sacrificing their 15 mins of fame and using it to *sugar* on other people who never even provoked him.

It's like someone committing murder because the your wife cheated with that guy. Is it completely over the top? Yes...does it establish motive?..Yes. ...which explains the reaction.

Like wtf did Elon do to the cave guy that provoked him into nuking his image as a decent human being and a national hero?

 

[lolachampcar]

For all we know, this could have been what happened. Someone in the government could have called Elon and reminded him just how much the government was paying SpaceX for its contracts. They could have said, we can pay for Starlink and reduce the amount we pay for future SpaceX contracts, or we'll add the cost of the Starlink service to the SpaceX contracts and you provide the service for "free", and get the free advertising and good will. Your choice. And if you ever tweet that this conversation took place, we do the former and not the latter, or SpaceX eats the costs.

So what you are really saying is Boeing needs to be paying for the service.

 

[STS-134]

They only backtracked later when they found it matches their own narrative:
...
As for what the Chinese people think, they aren't blind to the fact that Elon has lots of business interests in mainland China (neither are people in Taiwan or the west).

Well the problem is that you have two "they"s in that quote, and each refers to a different group. The first refers to the Chinese government leadership, and the second refers to the Chinese people. And the latter definitely does not always agree with the former. Nor does the latter, being a large group of people with diverse opinions, even agree with each other. My friend and her family are pretty disgusted with her in-laws for supporting the actions of the government re: COVID-19 lockdowns but all of them are Chinese citizens (this was as of February/April of this year; not sure the in-laws have changed their opinion or not but the point is, Chinese people were disagreeing with other Chinese people at that time).

 

[zecar]

Has SpaceX launch more Starlink satellites in Ukraines orbit since the start of the war?

While some Ukrainiane usage may be 100X a typical household, obviously the system usage isn't a couple of orders of magnitudes higher than typical.

I'm sure plenty of Ukrainian usage is porn and tik tok. I would bet that critical military usage is 5-10% of overall usage. It's nice to make a video call home when deployed if bandwidth is available.