These are solely the newest examples of why the federal authorities has no viable approach to break up with Mr. Musk, at the very least so long as the US decides it’ll proceed house exploration and deter its largest superpower rivals. It could denounce him and declare that each one People ought to reject his views. But it surely wants him, or at the very least his rockets and his satellites, greater than ever.
And the White Home and Pentagon each know that.
Hardly ever has the U.S. authorities so trusted the know-how supplied by a single, if petulant, technologist with views that it has so publicly declared repugnant. And but, by the account of administration officers, they don’t have any selection — and won’t for some time. As a result of there are, proper now, few viable alternate options.
It’s an uncommon predicament. If a prime government of one of many conventional publicly held protection contractors — Raytheon or Boeing or Lockheed Martin — had embraced an antisemitic conspiracy concept the best way Mr. Musk did, there can be stress from shareholders and prospects alike for a resignation. Actually, advertisers like IBM and Apple and Warner Bros. Discovery have been announcing in recent days that they’ll pause doing business on X, previously often called Twitter. Mr. Musk, quite than apologize, has threatened lawsuits.
However SpaceX is privately held, fully managed by Mr. Musk. (Tesla, his electrical automobile firm, is publicly held.) And thus far, whereas the White Home has been outspoken, the Pentagon has been silent.
“It will be good to have alternate options, and the U.S. authorities has tried to develop some,” Walter Isaacson, Mr. Musk’s biographer, stated in an interview on Sunday. “However no different firm,” he stated, together with United Launch Alliance, a Boeing and Lockheed Martin enterprise, has “been capable of make reusable rockets, or get astronauts into orbit, or get a few of these heavy satellites into high-Earth orbit.”
