And now it's a crisis: Elon Musk's contacts with Vladimir Putin are the stuff of national security nightmares

We're all getting tired of saying this and thinking this, but as bad as this story is—there's no way it's not going to turn out to be much, much worse.

The Wall Street Journal is now reporting that Elon Musk, the theoretical richest man in the world and the man whose most recent initiatives have included rampant promotion of white supremacist conspiracy theories on social media and a straightforwardly illegal vote-buying scheme for the purposes of getting his new rapist seditionist convicted felon friend Donald Trump back into the White House, has been in "regular contact" with murderous Russian kleptocrat Vladimir Putin for the past few years.

Yeah. What a coincidence.

The discussions, confirmed by several current and former U.S., European and Russian officials, touch on personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions.

At one point, Putin asked the billionaire to avoid activating his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping, said two people briefed on the request.

Musk now represents, largely due to several decades worth of successful efforts by fabulously wealthy Americans to "privatize" any government program that they would prefer to have monopoly power over, a significant chunk of all U.S. space capabilities.

He has arguably already used that power to unilaterally undermine U.S. interests to Russia's own advantage. In Sept. 2023, it was revealed that Musk "thwarted" a major Ukrainian naval attack by denying Ukraine access to his Starlink satellites.

According to excerpts published by CNN, a soon-to-be-released biography of the SpaceX CEO claims that Musk secretly ordered his engineers to turn off his Starlink satellite network over Russian-occupied Crimea last year in order to prevent a Ukrainian drone attack on Russia’s naval fleet. 

Musk claims he refused access because he, a Rich Person with no military commission, allegedly believed a successful Ukrainian attack on Russia's fleet might have led Russia to launch a nuclear response. If Musk was secretly in direct contact with Putin during this same time frame, it paints a significantly different picture than we first learned.

The Putin request that Musk deny satellite services to Taiwan to bring advantage the Chinese government shows that whatever the relationship between the two men was, Putin felt comfortable asking for strategic international favors from Musk.

Musk's contacts with Putin demonstrate an exceptional stupidity. Putin is known, first and foremost, as an international murderer. His security forces have killed countless Putin critics and opponents, executing each through methods as primitive as throwing them off Moscow balconies to elaborate poisoning schemes abroad. For Musk to put himself directly in the crosshairs of a man who governs through extortion and murder—stripped from any veneer of U.S. government involvement—Musk willingly exposed himself as the world's wealthiest and most useful target. It was likely Musk's ego that led him to believe he should personally develop a relationship with the strongman, rather than leaving diplomacy to actual diplomats.

So now we don't know which of Musk's actions are because Musk is a raging supporter of white nationalist hoaxes and conspiracy theories, and which are because Musk may have been pressured into doing "favors" by a man who could easily have him killed in any city on the globe.

Musk is a man who famously believed that a Twitter account reporting on the movement of his private jet represented an unacceptable security risk. And yet he somehow didn't think developing a tit-for-tat relationship with the world's most aggressive criminal regime would be a reckless and dangerous act?

From the Journal:

Musk has forged deep business ties with U.S. military and intelligence agencies, giving him unique visibility into some of America’s most sensitive space programs. SpaceX, which operates the Starlink service, won a $1.8 billion classified contract in 2021 and is the primary rocket launcher for the Pentagon and NASA. Musk has a security clearance that allows him access to certain classified information. [...]

One person aware of the conversations said the government faces a dilemma because it is so dependent on the billionaire’s technologies. SpaceX launches vital national security satellites into orbit and is the company NASA relies on to transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station. 

A "dilemma" doesn't even begin to describe it. The man heading $1.8 billion worth of classified programs is in direct contact with the United States' most dangerous military opponent—a relationship that includes being pressed for favors by that opponent. What would Musk reveal—what might he have already revealed—if Putin issued the vaguest of threats and asked to know a detail of this nation's classified programs that Putin was certain Musk knew?

We don't need to speculate. It apparently already happened.

Later in 2022, Musk was having regular conversations with “high-level Russians,” according to a person familiar with the interactions. At the time, there was pressure from the Kremlin on Musk’s businesses and “implicit threats against him,” the person said. 

It's baffling the man would put himself in that position, even if there was no intent to do anything untoward, and there's almost no damn chance that nothing "untoward" took place. We're not getting the whole story here, and we're not likely to get the assuredly-classified worst parts of the story anytime soon.

Earlier this year, Musk gave airtime to Putin and his views on the U.S. and Ukraine when X carried Tucker Carlson’s two-hour interview with the Russian leader inside the Kremlin. In that interview, Putin said he was sure Musk “was a smart person.”

This is preposterous. It's genuinely ridiculous—it's beyond parody or fiction. Musk has made his own bed on this one, and none of us should have a shred of sympathy for him now.

But the notion of the single most important company to America's space operations playing business footsie with the nation's most consequential military opponent? It's asinine, and if the man isn't already compromised then he needs to be stripped of all classified access because he simply doesn't have the mental capacity to understand the position he's in.

The United States has only two choices here. There are no others. The first is to cut off SpaceX from its classified government contracts, if not all government contracts, to protect national security. The second, if the United States is truly so dependent on SpaceX that the nation's space program could not survive the loss, is to nationalize the company and remove Musk from his role immediately.

Musk wants to be an international power of one, answering to no nation and tilting the course of wars based on his own instincts and preferences. It was impossibly foolish for America to allow its billionaire class to so thoroughly strip the nation for parts, and it is long past time to undo that damage. Taxing billionaires into oblivion would be a good long-term step. In the short term, Musk has turned himself into a clear and present danger to the sovereignty of both the United States and its allies and the Biden administration should take swift action to dismantle his ability to inflict such damage.

No wonder the man suddenly turned into a lapdog for seditious document-thieving Donald Trump. No wonder he now sees Trump's victory as existential to his own ambitions—and just what, pray tell, might Musk be pardon-shopping for in the early days of a new Trump-led, authoritarian-friendly government?