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Musk Leverages His Unelected Non-Existent Authority And Expertise To Steal $2 Billion FAA Contract From Verizon
from the what-conflict-of-interest? dept
The first Trump FCC tried to give Musk nearly a billion dollars to deliver expensive Starlink access to some traffic medians and airport parking lots. The Biden FCC clawed back most of those subsidies, (correctly) arguing that the service couldn’t deliver consistent speeds, and if we’re going to spend taxpayer money on broadband, more future-proof and less capacity constrained options like fiber and 5G should probably be prioritized.
This reasonable ruling resulted in no limit of manufactured grievance in the Trump and GOP extended conspiracy fiction universe, with right wingers falsely claiming that Musk — who insists he hates subsidies until he doesn’t — was somehow being unfairly victimized by the previous administration.
Not surprisingly, Trump 2.0 is going to massively over-compensate for this fake scandal, and slather their favorite fake engineer billionaire manbaby with cash at every conceivable opportunity.
That apparently starts with giving Musk and Starlink a lucrative new FAA contract as Musk and his 4chan tween DOGE minions set about pretending to fix government by throwing it into chaos. Musk appears to be trying to elbow out Verizon, which has an existing 15 year, $2 billion contract with the agency to upgrade its infrastructure that was obtained through traditional transparent bidding processes.
The length and price tag of Starlink’s new FAA contract were, unsurprisingly, not publicly disclosed. Which is weird for a DOGE figurehead that professes to care so much about transparency:
“The contract comes while Musk is leading efforts to make deep cuts in federal government spending, including staffing cuts at the FAA, and some critics are raising questions about conflicts of interest over his role overseeing government agencies that are supposed to be regulating his businesses.”
Bloomberg had a little more leaked inside detail, noting the partnership would “eventually” include 4,000 Starlink terminals and be deployed over the next 12 to 18 months. Follow up reporting from the Washington Post suggests there’s some consternation about Musk’s giant handout among FAA officials.
In a post to his right wing propaganda platform, Musk stated, without any sort of evidence, that the “Verizon system is not working and so is putting air travelers at serious risk.” Basically falsely claiming that Verizon might be killing U.S. air travelers:
I’d just like to pause for a moment to acknowledge that as somebody who has probably written more about Verizon than anybody alive, it takes a very specific type of shitty villain to have me backing Verizon.
Verizon signed up for Trump 2.0 eager to get a giant tax cut for doing nothing. And relentless attacks on organized labor. And the total evisceration of corporate oversight of whatever’s left of FCC consumer protection authority. And they’re keen to get their giant $20 billion merger with Frontier rubber stamped.
That’s a lot of potential money at stake, so I’m not sure Verizon will show any backbone and file suit here. But if they don’t, shareholders will certainly have the opportunity to sue. Knowing Verizon’s greasy lobbying and legal practices pretty intimately, it’s all a very leopards-eating-faces sort of affair.
But again, Musk stealing Verizon’s FAA contract is just one of countless conflicts of interest that arise with having an unelected bureaucrat illegally declaring how government should or shouldn’t function and illegally bypassing bidding processes. Not to mention the numerous privacy and national intelligence issues.
The FAA contract is certainly just the opening salvo for Musk favoritism. The U.S. government has already threatened to pull Ukraine’s access to Starlink unless they sign off on a mineral deal that would be beneficial to Tesla. You probably also missed that USAID officials were investigating Starlink‘s use in Ukraine right before Trump and Musk engaged in a rapid unscheduled disassembly of the agency.
It’s clear the Trump NTIA is also hoping to redirect some of the $42.5 billion in BEAD broadband infrastructure subsidies away from existing projects and toward Musk’s Starlink whenever possible. That’s not just bad due to corruption, but because it’s going to wind up redirecting a lot of taxpayer money away from small local businesses and popular community-owned broadband networks.
Starlink is a good option if you’re stuck in the middle of nowhere with nothing else. But “I didn’t do the reading” guys like Joe Rogan tend to think Starlink is akin to some kind of magic pixie dust you can just sprinkle around to fix everything.
They like to ignore that the platform can’t really scale, customer service is largely nonexistent, and it’s too expensive for the folks most in need of reliable broadband access. They like to ignore that the nature of satellite physics and capacity means slowdowns and annoying restrictions are inevitable. They also like to ignore the system is harming astronomical research and the ozone layer. You know, small details.
Rank corruption aside, the GOP is genuinely convinced that Musk is an engineering super-genius who can fix government with a wave of his hand. They genuinely have no idea that this persona was a press-enabled mythology providing cover for a rank opportunist who takes credit for other peoples’ ideas, something the tech press only belatedly discovered during his bungled takeover of Twitter.
So they’re keen on throwing all of their eggs in the Elon Musk basket, fairly oblivious to the fact they’ve given absolute power to a conspiratorial oligarch who genuinely has no Earthly idea what he’s actually doing. So yeah, a lot of this is just corrupt cronyism pretty typical in an authoritarian kakistocracy. But a lot of it genuinely is being driven by rank delusion into Musk’s actual intellect and expertise, which is going to end extremely, extremely badly for absolutely everybody involved.
Filed Under: air travel, broadband, conflicts of interest, corruption, elon musk, faa, low earth orbit, safety, satellite
Companies: spacex, starlink, verizon
Comments on “Musk Leverages His Unelected Non-Existent Authority And Expertise To Steal $2 Billion FAA Contract From Verizon”
^^^ All That
I don’t do the resume thing. Having been here long enough everything Karl said in this op-ed is right on the money.
Now the generalist would add something about the US government now filled with carnie crooks.
/smdh
If there’s any bright silver lining to all of this, it’s that Ulysses S Grant already ran a corrupt robber-baron government in the 1870s and that led to a lot of important reforms. The pain we’re seeing with Trump will ultimately do the US good in the long term as it will reinforce our political and social system against this kind of stuff.
Assuming the Republic survives the next 47 months. God damn, has it only been a month?
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I thought so after Trump’s last term, but what actual legal reforms were made while Biden was in power? I can’t think of much. A lot of the Presidential role is still defined more by tradition than explicit rules.
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Did the system get reinforced though? Trump and Mitch McConnell proved that the American system was largely defended by handshake agreements and there was nothing in place to defend against liars and crooks that couldn’t just be legislated against, sidestepped or ignored entirely.
Re: Re:
There were around 150 years in there for the system to soften itself up again.
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Rome wasn’t built in a day. But it was sacked in about a half-week.
Sympathize with Verizon?
Never did I ever think I would side with Verizon when it comes to hoovering up undeserved subsidies- but this is a weird world in which we live.
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It looks like the contract is for a “business-class” service. Generally, even the huge incumbent providers do this well, and that was true even when there was no competition. Occasionally, a story pops up in which someone orders such service to their home, and is impressed and surprised. It’s not cheap, though.
In this case, Starlink is likely to be a step down for major airports. It’ll be great for small, remote airfields, like in rural Alaska, but doesn’t make any sense in populated areas that will have a lot of radio interference. Unless they’re gonna let Starlink use reserved maritime/aeronautical frequencies—maybe this whole thing is a ploy to go beyond the crowded Ku and Ka bands.
Right-wing talking point currently is that musk is saving us trillions. Reality need not apply; the dumb-dumbs are lapping it up.
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That there is as yet no real-world source to prove musk saved the US even $1 means that any and every post anywhere claiming musk is right comes from a NPC incapable of thinking independently of its propaganda programming.
Well that's terrifying
Two things that bring terror in this:
I know there is a treaty about that…but what does the EMP pulse do to LEO satellites, like Starlink?
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Depends on where the EMP occurs. Surface, it’s not going to do much squared losses and all that. In order….it’s no bueno.
'Conflict of interest implies I don't own both.'
“The contract comes while Musk is leading efforts to make deep cuts in federal government spending, including staffing cuts at the FAA, and some critics are raising questions about conflicts of interest over his role overseeing government agencies that are supposed to be regulating his businesses.”
In Elon’s mind I suspect that he doesn’t consider it a conflict of interest at all, after all he’s been given the keys to the entire government and free reign to do whatever the hell he wants with it, and naturally that includes deciding where the money is and is not going.
Musk: After one month of hard work, now it’s payback time!
Thank god he doesn’t own a peanut farm.
Maybe the “efficiency” in DOGE in the sense of “efficiently transferring all the wealth in the US to Musk”. Of course even then it’s doing a terrible job at it’s “stated” goal.
Anyone that defends this has the moral and ethical strength of a used Kleenex. It’s criminal on the face.
EMP
It’s EMP not “EMP pulse” just like it’s SCUBA not “SCUBA gear.” But that aside, EMPs are deployed at many heights depending on the power of the blast (amount of radiation expelled) and the nature of the attack.
The height is anything the attacker wants it to be but if the goal is knocking out LEO birds then YES that’s within range for countries with those launch caps. That includes Russia, North Korea, China, and Iran.
It is INCREDIBLY STUPID to go from Verizon’s (not a fan) terrestrial network to Starlink. By INCREDIBLY STUPID I also mean shortsighted, stupid, and introducing multiple points of failure (MPOFs).
When designing any network reliablity is one of the goals to preserve the SLA of near 100%. Fiber-optic underground in conduits is the best layer-1 service. Putting a PON on top of that instead of active optics is great. Finally the CPE demarc being redundant in PSUs and OFUs is best.
Starlink is as far from that as you can get.
You know, for years those of us outside America have hearing about America’s democracy being the finest institution on Earth with a constitution that’s the greatest document ever written.
But now here we are with a dangerously unstable idiot and his dangerously unstable idiot South African friend gutting the civil service, making sweeping executive orders, targeting immigrants and transsexuals, cutting badly needed world aid, causing diplomatic incidents, and making capricious threats about tariffs.
And, apparently, there’s very little the system of US government can actually do about that. The best any opponents or critics of Trump can do is apparently to say “but, but … He can’t do that! … Can he?”
Say what you will about our UK system of government, and it certainly has many flaws, but at least there are systems in place to tackle this sort of thing. The reason we’ve gone through several Prime Ministers in a short time is because there is a clear mechanism for removing a damaging and unpopular Prime Minister. Liz Truss lasted 45 days, for example, which shows how fast and decisive the system can be.
I think the crux of the problem is that Americans have elevated the position of President to almost mythical god-like status. A figuratively (and, in many ways, literally) unimpeachable figure. And that’s incredibly dangerous. As we can now plainly see.
Re: Thanks to the oligarchy.
This is exactly what Republicans want. They want to increase execute power so they can bypass checks and balances. But why bother? The Supreme Court is on their knees, begging Trump to let them rubber stamp his power grab.
Even worse? Republican Senators are considering making the tax cuts (for billionaires like Musk – surprise!) count as ZERO DOLLARS in their budget math. Because not paying your debts and just imagining they are not there works out great.
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Really? Because it’s basically a prototype that’s still semi-operational. There have been a ton of improvements made over the centuries that have made their way into other democratic countries’ newer constitutions.
The cracks in ours have been apparent since the Fugitive Slave Act.
Is it just me, but a Venn-diagram of Musk’s and Hugo Drax’s apparent attributes seems to overlap almost 100% at this point.
HUGO Drax
I loved that guy. He had everything so he had to steal an “extra” STS vehicle to take to his “private unkown launchpad” where girsl wandered around in miniskirts and sharks had lasers. (Later to be adopted by Mike Meyers’ Austin Powers movie.)
But sadly your comment is 5 days alter than
https://x.com/SergiusAugustus/status/1893722370893889802
where Drax is called “Proto Musk.”
E
One of my faves from that era. Chest-thump and thumbs up to Richard Kiel, RIP.
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FYI, Richard Kiel played Jaws in the Bond movies, not Hugo Drax. Do keep up, 007!
Re: Re: JAWS
Yes, I’m aware what character was played by whom. I’ve been watching James Bond since Junior High 🙂
Thanks, and may Desmond Llewellyn rest in peace as well.
Can’t wait for the next one by “Amazon MGM Studios”. /smdh
FAA facilities… I.e. Airport control towers.
Forall that they don’t have LOS issues, With the exception of some small rural airports that may not even have controllers, Airports are probably one of the worst fits for satellite links..
They’re usually fairly near well served urban areas, and they pretty much would need one line to the tower, sine they’re not branching out over an entire neighborhood.
They’re alo he one place you don’t want to use a carrier with irregular weather, bandwidth or capacity issues, not to mention the distinct possibility of interference.