Watching Elon bros swarm this by regurgitating Elon’s evasive bullshit excuses about TOS violations and Kremlin propaganda about hacking is truly a sight to behold. The slavish devotion of idiots to their idol is quite on par with the useful idiots’ to the Kremlin. I am particularly fond of the “Elon saved Ukraine” bit — as if 85% of the terminals SpaceX donated in 2022 were not eventually paid for by US, Poland, and Germany, and as if the Europeans haven’t been paying millions for contracts since, substantially boosting the company’s revenue with income that far exceeds whatever it donated back then. The TOS violation allegation is particularly egregious since Ukraine does use a lot of whitelisted terminals on Starlink for non-military purposes and does not violate the TOS of the commercial service. What got throttled is the Starshield service, which is specifically designed for ministry use and which the company provides under contract, with its usual geofencing. Musk knows this, which is why he initially tried to deflect the blame to the White House. But then Rubio claimed Starshield isn’t available to Ukraine, which was another deliberate obfuscation — there’s another thing under the same moniker, which is available only to DoD and which does include other satellites in partnership with SpaceX , which is indeed not available to Ukraine. But it’s not the Starshield service, and Rubio must know this. But of course he’s also busy deflecting back to Elon. Trump tried to pretend it does not matter who did what but the facts are clear enough: the service was throttled, it was kept so until public outcry and threats from Congress caused Trump to tell Elon to lift the cap, which he did. But now Elon is in hot water because Congress will certainly have to take a closer look as to how he was able to run his own foreign policy over existing contract terms. It’s going to be bad for SpaceX for sure because there will be questions about Pentagon’s own relationship with the company and its future contracts around the world. Elon bros are fuming and imagine that Starlink is irreplaceable but the fact is that it is very much replaceable. In the shorter term by tech that is worse and less capable, but over time certainly with a decent equivalent. The Europeans are well positioned to do this and are now quite motivated. Expect serious competition that the tech bros here dismiss only because they are fucking clueless about Europe’s industrial might and native talent.