Musk isn’t afraid to use his technologies to advance his politics. We’ve seen how his tweaks to X have made it more Nazi-friendly, and how his chatbot will start talking about “white genocide.” We’ve seen Musk enable a war effort, and we’ve seen him deny that aid when it suited him to do so. This has all happened while Starlink is in its relative... See more

In the first weeks and months of 2025, his friends at the Trump State Department tried to strong-arm nations like Gambia into buying Starlink. The Trump White House hit tiny Lesotho with crushing 50 percent tariffs; the country then quickly licensed Starlink as a way of demonstrating “goodwill and intent to welcome US businesses,” according to a... See more

The Pentagon is candid in its ambitions to try to destroy and disable Chinese and Russian spacecraft—and protect American ones from what they say are similar attacks. In March, the US military released a report titled “Space Warfighting.” It includes high-level plans for “orbital strike,” or “actions taken to destroy, disrupt, or degrade adversary... See more

The Trump administration, according to The Wall Street Journal, did conduct a review of NASA and Department of Defense deals. But finding ways to remove Musk was functionally impossible. “Everybody in DOD was like, ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, let’s not do that.’ Because they’re so dependent on SpaceX now, and frankly, becoming increasingly dependent... See more

But all of that is peanuts, potentially, compared to Trump’s pursuit of a “Golden Dome” over America, which would allegedly protect it from ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles all at once. Trump picked the top general from the Space Force to lead it and promised that such a defense would include “space-based sensors and interceptors.” That... See more