1/ The Musk-Trump decision to degrade Ukraine's Starlink access as a pressure tactic is a disaster not just for the United States' reputation but for the entire US defence industry. Musk's action may end up burning the whole industry. ⬇️
2/ When Trump returned to power in 2024, many people expressed concerns that he might use a supposed "kill switch" in exported US military equipment – especially the F-35 – to force purchasers to do his bidding. 3/ To be clear, at the time this was purely hypothetical. There were no clearly identified kill switches and no concrete indication that Trump could or would do this. Advocates for the US defence industry dismissed the possibility that it could or would ever happen. 4/ Except that it now *has* happened, according to the reporting of @telegraph.co.uk. This has profound implications for the US defence industry. 5/ First, it's worth highlighting that SpaceX had no commercial or legal rationale for intervening. There's no indication that Ukraine, a paying customer, was breaking its contract or violating its terms of service. 6/ Second (looking at it purely commercially), the war is good for SpaceX. It's making a lot of money from selling Starlink terminals and connections to Ukraine. A Ukrainian surrender to Russia would be against its own commercial interests. 7/ Third, SpaceX has an overwhelming interest in assuring its customers that its service is consistently reliable, especially for mission-critical use cases where lives depend on it. 8/ Elon Musk has blown all of that up for purely personal reasons. He has been outspoken in his statements against President Zelenskyy and Ukraine's continued fight to preserve its independence. None of this is to SpaceX's benefit or commercial interests. 9/ What Musk has demonstrated is that the Starlink kill switch is real, that he personally controls it, and that he's willing to use it for purely personal reasons, against the interests of his own company and country. This is utterly disastrous for SpaceX's credibility. 10/ In the short term I expect to see Starlink being dropped like a hot potato by governments around the world. Nobody will want to be in the same position as Ukraine, of imploring Musk to turn it back on while their civilians are being killed as a direct result of the outage. 11/ I would also be unsurprised to see shareholder lawsuits against Musk for violating his fiduciary duties as a director for his actions in this affair. What he's done is almost certain to be highly destructive for SpaceX's shareholder value. 12/ But this isn't just a Musk issue. The Telegraph's reporting implicates Trump as authorising Musk's actions. And Trump has power over the entire US defence industry. This means, for example, that the nightmare scenario of cutting off support for exported F-35s is now real. 13/ Trump has shown clearly that he's willing to use the leverage provided by US defence exports to pressure allies, even at the cost of civilian lives and increased risk to US personnel and facilities in that country. This would have been unthinkable for any other Administration. 14/ As a result, Trump and Musk between them have effectively wrecked trust in US defence exports. They've shown how US military equipment can be weaponised in the most dramatic way possible, with complete disregard for the consequent loss of life. 15/ So it's not just SpaceX that will suffer; governments buying equipment or services from the US will almost certainly now be asking how they can de-risk themselves. The obvious answer will be to not buy American in the first place. /end