Putin wants peace-we should be negotiating peace with Putin,’ ” Reid Hoffman, who helped start PayPal with Musk, recalled. “He was onstage, and he said, ‘We should be negotiating. That month, at a conference in Aspen attended by business and political figures, Musk even appeared to express support for Vladimir Putin. Musk was also growing increasingly uneasy with the fact that his technology was being used for warfare. Forbes estimated Musk’s personal net worth at two hundred and twenty billion dollars, making him the world’s richest man.) (CNBC recently valued SpaceX at nearly a hundred and fifty billion dollars. “We are not in a position to further donate terminals to Ukraine, or fund the existing terminals for an indefinite period of time,” SpaceX’s director of government sales told the Pentagon in a letter, last September. But, as the war ground on, SpaceX began to balk at the cost. Initially, Musk showed unreserved support for the Ukrainian cause, responding encouragingly as Mykhailo Fedorov, the Ukrainian minister for digital transformation, tweeted pictures of equipment in the field. A soldier in Ukraine’s signal corps who was responsible for maintaining Starlink access on the front lines, and who asked to be identified only by his first name, Mykola, told me, “It’s the essential backbone of communication on the battlefield.” Agency for International Development and with European governments, and pro-bono contributions from SpaceX facilitated the transfer of thousands of Starlink units to Ukraine. In the ensuing months, fund-raising in Silicon Valley’s Ukrainian community, contracts with the U.S.

“It was all about ‘Let’s fucking go, people are dying.’ ” “Nobody thought about it back then,” one of them, a Ukrainian tech executive, told me. Three people involved in bringing Starlink to Ukraine, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they worried that Musk, if upset, could withdraw his services, told me that they originally overlooked the significance of his personal control. The units have limited range, but in this situation that was an advantage: although a nationwide network of dishes was required, it would be difficult for Russia to completely dismantle Ukrainian connectivity. The tripod-mounted dishes, each about the size of a computer display and clad in white plastic reminiscent of the sleek design sensibility of Musk’s Tesla electric cars, connect with a network of satellites. Ukrainian officials and a loose coalition of expatriates in the tech sector, brainstorming in group chats on WhatsApp and Signal, found a potential solution: SpaceX, which manufactures a line of mobile Internet terminals called Starlink. Along with conventional assaults, the Kremlin was conducting cyberattacks against Ukraine’s digital infrastructure. Musk had become involved in the war in Ukraine soon after Russia invaded, in February, 2022. And that would have real operational impact for the Ukrainians.” Musk “could turn it off at any given moment. “We started to get a little panicked,” the senior defense official, one of four who described the standoff to me, recalled. More alarmingly, SpaceX had recently given the Pentagon an ultimatum: if it didn’t assume the cost of providing service in Ukraine, which the company calculated at some four hundred million dollars annually, it would cut off access. But, in recent days, the forces had found their connectivity severed as they entered territory contested by Russia. SpaceX, Musk’s space-exploration company, had for months been providing Internet access across Ukraine, allowing the country’s forces to plan attacks and to defend themselves. “Even though Musk is not technically a diplomat or statesman, I felt it was important to treat him as such, given the influence he had on this issue,” Kahl told me.

A senior defense official told me that Kahl was surprised by whom he was about to contact: “He was, like, ‘Why am I calling Elon Musk?’ ” Kahl had returned to his room, with its heavy drapery and distant view of the Eiffel Tower, after a day of meetings with officials from the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. A staffer handed him an iPhone-in part to avoid inviting an onslaught of late-night texts and colorful emojis on Kahl’s own phone. Last October, Colin Kahl, then the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy at the Pentagon, sat in a hotel in Paris and prepared to make a call to avert disaster in Ukraine.

Monopoly city rules