Musk biographer Isaacson walks back bombshell Ukraine-Crimea story
Elon Musk’s biographer is walking back a key claim in his highly anticipated biography even as it hits store shelves this week.
Last week an excerpt from journalist and historian Walter Isaacson’s “Elon Musk” ran in several publications. In it, the veteran author of multiple major biographies wrote that Mr. Musk secretly told his engineers to turn off Starlink satellite access around the Russian-controlled Crimean coast ahead of a Ukrainian sneak attack on Russian ships in the area.
In the excerpt, Mr. Isaccson explained that Mr. Musk did not want his company Starlink/SpaceX to be responsible for escalating the conflict.
Now, after a weeklong media firestorm, Mr. Isaacson is amending his claims. On Thursday evening, Mr. Musk fired back at the claims on X, the platform he now owns formerly known as Twitter, saying that the regions in question around Crimea, which Russia unilaterally annexed in 2014, never had access to Starlink satellite technology in the first place.
“There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol,” he wrote. “The obvious intent being to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor.”
Mr. Musk’s rebuttal was confirmed by Mr. Isaacson two days later. The author wrote on X that the Ukrainians were under the false impression that they had access to Starlink everywhere and that Mr. Musk simply reaffirmed the existing policy by refusing to extend it to Crimea.
“To clarify on the Starlink issue: the Ukrainians THOUGHT coverage was enabled all the way to Crimea, but it was not,” he wrote. “They asked Musk to enable it for their drone sub attack on the Russian fleet. Musk did not enable it, because he thought, probably correctly, that [doing so] would cause a major war.”
Mr. Isaacson, who has published highly praised biographies of such figures as Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs, is now grappling with an embarrassing situation as publications update their coverage from last week. Simon & Schuster, which is publishing “Elon Musk,” said that all future editions of the book will be updated to reflect the correction. The book is expected to hit shelves this week.
Despite the correction, many remain concerned that a private individual like Mr. Musk could have such a powerful say over the fate of the Ukrainian military. Mr. Musk — and his fans — have defended his actions, saying that the billionaire entrepreneur did what he could to avoid a “mini-Pearl Harbor” and has kept his Starlink network operational over most of Ukraine since the invasion of February 2022 to frustrate Russian jamming attacks.
