The 4th Reich Is BIG MAD With Elon Musk

nbcnews  |  Tech billionaire Elon Musk has come under fire from Ukraine after it emerged he thwarted a major attack on the Russian navy.

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 was worried that the planned attack on the Kremlin’s Black Sea fleet, which occurred early in the war, could escalate tensions and potentially lead to nuclear conflict, according to the extract from historian Walter Isaacson’s upcoming book.

The claim was immediately met with criticism from Kyiv. 

Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, blasted the tech billionaire on X, formerly Twitter, which Musk owns. 

“Sometimes a mistake is much more than just a mistake,” Podolyak wrote. 

“By not allowing Ukrainian drones to destroy part of the Russian military (!) fleet via #Starlink interference, @elonmusk allowed this fleet to fire Kalibr missiles at Ukrainian cities,” he added.

Russia is known to have used its naval ships in the Black Sea to strike deep into Ukrainian territory and impose an effective blockade of the Ukrainian Black Sea coast, which is crucial to global grain shipments. 

“As a result, civilians, children are being killed,” Podolyak said. “This is the price of a cocktail of ignorance and big ego. However, the question still remains: why do some people so desperately want to defend war criminals and their desire to commit murder? And do they now realize that they are committing evil and encouraging evil?”

Musk responded to the report, denying that he turned off the service but accepting he had chosen not to enable the attack as he did not want to become directly involved in the war. 

“The Starlink regions in question were not activated. SpaceX did not deactivate anything,” Musk said in a response to a thread on X about the new book’s claims. 

“There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol,” he said in another response, referring to a key port city in Crimea that is home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. 

“The obvious intent being to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor,” Musk added. “If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.”

According to the excerpts from the new biography, it meant that Ukrainian submarine drones packed with explosives lost connectivity as they approached the Russian ships, and saw them “washed ashore harmlessly.”

The book also delves into how Musk’s decision played out, alleging Musk spoke with top U.S. officials along with the Russian ambassador to the U.S.

NBC News has reached out to SpaceX and Zelenskyy’s office for comment.