Krugman Calls for Musk to Lose Starlink Control After Ukraine Internet Cutoff

Nobel Prize winning economist, Paul Krugman, wrote an important article this morning. In it, he decried Elon Musk and his decision to take down Ukraine’s access to Starlink, which allows the country to protect itself from Russian attacks through drone technology.

“Did Elon Musk decide by personal fiat to cut off Ukraine’s access to vital communications?” Krugman asks. “Although Musk claims that the decision was made by Trump, according to the Wall Street Journal, some US officials state that Musk did indeed take it upon himself to pull the plug on Ukraine.”

Krugman muses that US President Donald J. Trump told him to do it, “sotto voce, Mafia-style: ‘This Zelenskyy guy is a problem. Someone should do something about it.'” Moreover, Krugman reminds us, Trump has the ear of Musk and could demand that Musk restore Ukraine’s access.

Of course, that hasn’t happened.

“Decisions about which countries have full access to Starlink’s capacity are as much a matter of foreign policy and national security as decisions about which countries will be allowed to buy and operate US high-tech weapons,” Krugman continues. “Such decisions cannot, must not, be left up to private individuals. This would be true even if these individuals were patriots who supported democracy and American values. They definitely shouldn’t be left in the hands of this guy.”

If you have any doubt that Musk was looking over the shoulders of Starlink IT engineers when Ukraine’s access to Starlink vanished and their drones fell out of the sky, then perhaps a reminder of Musk’s heil hand gesture during a speech on US President Donald Trump’s inauguration day is in order. In response to backlash over his heil gesture, Musk professed boredom with the topic. “The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired,” Musk posted on X several hours after he left the stage.

Tired? No. We continue to be horrified by Musk’s actions. He is part-and-parcel of a thought community that has pushed the US swirling into a sewer, a place where treason is celebrated and the common good is vilified.

This week Musk unveiled the reenvisioned Tesla Roadster, with a supposed capacity to fly like something out of The Jetsons cartoon. Musk is a billionaire who draws upon seemingly innocuous pop culture references, right? That’s a bit cute, if sometimes childish. Is he someone on the spectrum who doesn’t understand how his actions affect others? No. That’s a weak excuse. Instead, we should look at his puerile approach to communicating as a way to reimpose historic economic conditions from a colonialist, imperialist past.

This is the person who led DOGE to seek out fraud. What that really meant was federal jobs frozen, medical research in jeopardy, wholesale data theft, loss of consumer protections, and indiscriminate firings. It wasn’t lack of efficiency that turned out to be the DOGE problem. It was Musk’s complicity that undermined entire lives of career federal workers and set back scientific research for what could become decades.

He lacks empathy and is a calculating menace to the world.

Perhaps it’s time to admit Musk’s love of fantasy and his purported appeals to save humanity are actually intertwined with a dystopian, winner-take-all form of extreme capitalism.

We cannot allow Musk to continue to control of Starlink, Krugman argues. “It’s a matter of national security: we cannot let private individuals make foreign and defense policy,” he says, “and it would be totally irresponsible to leave a crucial military asset in the hands of a racist, authoritarian conspiracy theorist.”

But will the US Congress listen and take action? It’s doubtful.