Hey there.
Elon Musk may look like a clown on social
media, but there is a good deal of method
to his madness.
Tesla is an emphatically liberal friendly
company, that would be nowhere without Obama's
subsidies and is aimed squarely at what has
so far been the very Democratic concern of
climate change.
The past three years should have been very
scary ones for Tesla.
But thanks to his absurd Twitter presence
Elon Musk has both made himself an inescapable
celebrity, and positioned himself personally
as somewhat MAGA friendly.
The President loves both those things, and
Musk's government subsidy dependent companies
haven't just survived the Trump era, they
have thrived.
This is nothing compared to Musk's next act.
Tesla is going to do great under whatever
version of the Green New Deal passes under
the next Democratic president.
SpaceX's provision of a fully American space
launch capability will make Musk indispensable
to future presidents of either party.
But today I want to talk about a sort of nuclear
option that Musk is giving to the US government
that is far more terrifying to China than
any US nuclear missile.
I am talking about Starlink of course.
If you have heard about this program, it's
probably in the context of astronomers being
angry about it.
Depending on how you measure it, there are
between 2 and 3,000 satellites in space today.
Starlink is currently planning to launch 12,000,
and could eventually put up as many as 42,000.
Astronomers are reasonably concerned about
what this will do to their view of the night
sky.
That's a real issue that needs to be resolved,
but there is plenty of coverage of it.
What isn't being covered enough is what these
satellites can do.
Officially they will bring internet to underserved
populations all over the world.
Unofficially it’s potentially the end of
government censorship of the internet.
Everywhere.
"We know how much the internet has changed
America, and we are already an open society.
Imagine how much it can change China.
Now there's no question China has been trying
to crack down on the internet.
Good Luck
[Laughter]
That's sort of like trying to nail Jello to
the wall."
Despite Clinton-era expectations, China really
has nailed the Jello to the wall and made
the internet work for them.
Through a mix of technology and sheer manpower,
China has constructed a great firewall that
allows them to censor all on-line activity
in the country.
At the same time they’ve used this walled
garden to build the only serious non-American
mass market technology companies.
Elon Musk’s Starlink project threatens both
China’s ability to censor, and its independent
tech industry.
To be sure there are all kinds of legal and
technical barriers to bathing China with US
government supported, open internet.
All of those barriers will be kept in place
as the network is being built, and it will
take a very conscious choice by SpaceX to
start offering services in China.
But Starlink is perhaps even more dangerous
to China as a threat than it would be in execution.
Musk has already stated that Starlink would
not be broadcast to China, in part because
they have the capacity to shoot his satellites
down.
This comment, made 4 years ago, may have been
somewhat tongue in cheek, but it was probably
reassuring to China.
It shouldn’t be.
The 540 Starlink Satellites launched so far
may already represent as many as a fifth of
the total satellites up there.
China has demonstrated it can shoot down a
single satellite, but can it shoot down thousands?
They certainly can’t do it without destroying
the whole world’s communication systems.
Blowing up a single satellite risks an ever
expanding field of space junk.
Blowing up thousands would block everybody’s
access to space.
China knows that it will never be able to
shoot these satellites down, so it has entered
into a sort of mutually assured destruction
pact with Elon Musk.
A lot of Tesla’s absurdly high valuation
comes from the company’s mysteriously good
relationship with China, and its surprisingly
friction free entry into that market.
If Elon Musk’s Starlink wants to screw China’s
governing model, then China can screw Elon
Musk’s Tesla.
In the short term this is a good strategy
for China.
Long term I’m not so sure.
Tesla is not just a car company.
It’s also big on solar panels, grid technology
and consumer and utility scale battery storage.
As the coming decades turn more science fiction
into reality, SpaceX and Tesla will be well
positioned to lead in industries that haven’t
even been thought up yet.
These developments will draw these companies
ever closer to the US government.
As this process continues, Tesla’s ability
to sell cars in China will become a less and
less important factor for Musk’s inter-weaved
empires.
This guy is becoming troublingly powerful,
but he’s not going to stop being a US citizen.
Starlink’s revolutionary potential should
become a large political factor in countries
like Egypt and Iran by the end of the decade
if not sooner.
But not with China.
It’s much more likely that Musk’s technology
will be reserved as a threat, first by Musk
to keep selling Teslas, and later by the US
government to aid in all manner of negotiations.
The US Defence industry wants to sell us more
useless nukes and aircraft carriers, but it’s
stuff like this that represents the US’s
real advantage in the New Cold War.
