It’s unbelievable how smarmy this guy is. You would think, being one of the richest men on the planet and having reached the pinnacle of the business world, that he would use at least some of his multibillion dollar fortune for the betterment of his fellow human beings. But no, he hurls himself into space. He buys and takes private the worlds largest and most influential social media site. I guess that takes a huge amount of chutzpah to do that while the rest of us queue up to try to carve out whatever we can in this world where so much wealth is concentrated in the hands of so few.
I’m pretty sure his Twitter password must be A$$h0L3.
Written for these daily prompts: My Vivid Blog (unbelievable), Ragtag Daily Prompt (smarmy), Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (pinnacle), E.M.’s Random Word Prompt (chutzpah), Your Daily Word Prompt (queue), and The Daily Spur (password).
This, That, and the Other 
I’m pretty sure if I had a spare 44 billion buck lying around, I wouldn’t use it to buy Twitter.
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Nor would I.
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Just have to say that he has used “at least some of his multibillion dollar fortune for the betterment of his fellow human beings.” But the picture you close is funny. It’s like, Oh, “that” guy.
https://www.inputmag.com/tech/starlink-russian-jamming-attack-us-military-elon-musk-vladimir-putin
…. the satellite internet company has apparently been thrown into the fray anyway. Starlink’s infrastructure was able to fend off a Russian cyberattack with incredible speed, according to Dave Tremper, the director of electronic warfare at the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Just a day after reports of the jamming attack came to light, Starlink managed to jump in and kill it. “Starlink had slung a line of code and fixed it,” Tremper said at the C4ISRNET virtual conference. “How they did that was eye-watering to me.”
PENTAGON’S GOT SOMETHING TO LEARN — It’s obvious from Tremper’s comments (particularly the “eye-watering” one) that the Pentagon really had no idea blocking a Russian cyberattack could be quite so easy. Tremper also noted specifically that the official U.S. response to that jamming attack had a “significant timeline” to correct the necessary vulnerabilities.
Already U.S. cybersecurity officials are planning to take notes directly from Starlink’s responses. “There’s a really interesting case study to look at the agility that Starlink had in their ability to address that problem,” Tremper said. “We need to be able to have that agility.
NOT ALL BAD? — Starlink, like all of Elon Musk’s Big Idea projects, has been met with a mixture of fanfare and outright disdain. The satellite internet program makes lofty promises — high download speeds and low latency just about anywhere on the planet — but those promises come with some sizable caveats. The upfront costs of setting up a Starlink terminal are certainly not affordable, for one thing, and customers that live in close proximity to each other have found their connections to be spotty at best.
SpaceX had sent some Starlink terminals [I think free while I’ll check into that further] to Ukraine when the Russian invasion first began, as a measure by which to assist Ukraine in maintaining internet connectivity. Russia reportedly tried jamming up those terminals almost as soon as they arrived — but Starlink was able to remotely close up its vulnerabilities with a relatively simple system update.
PENTAGON’S GOT SOMETHING TO LEARN — It’s obvious from Tremper’s comments (particularly the “eye-watering” one) that the Pentagon really had no idea blocking a Russian cyberattack could be quite so easy. Tremper also noted specifically that the official U.S. response to that jamming attack had a “significant timeline” to correct the necessary vulnerabilities.
Already U.S. cybersecurity officials are planning to take notes directly from Starlink’s responses. “There’s a really interesting case study to look at the agility that Starlink had in their ability to address that problem,” Tremper said. “We need to be able to have that agility.
NOT ALL BAD? — Starlink, like all of Elon Musk’s Big Idea projects, has been met with a mixture of fanfare and outright disdain. The satellite internet program makes lofty promises — high download speeds and low latency just about anywhere on the planet — but those promises come with some sizable caveats. The upfront costs of setting up a Starlink terminal are certainly not affordable, for one thing, [SpaceX loses about $800 for every home setup it sells*] and customers that live in close proximity to each other have found their connections to be spotty at best.
[* This can also be read: tax write-off. I don’t know if the customers pay anything for setup.]
Starlink as a company is also going to struggle with profitability for the foreseeable future… and launching the company’s full satellite array is going to costs upwards of $30 billion over the next decade.
If the Pentagon is to be believed, the technology behind Starlink is significantly more advanced than even the U.S. government knew. If we get nothing else out of Starlink, perhaps our top defense officials will be able to learn a thing or two from SpaceX’s satellites.
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Sigh: picture you “close”
was supposed to be picture you chose …
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Starlink as a company is also going to struggle with profitability for the foreseeable future… and launching the company’s full satellite array is going to costs upwards of $30 billion over the next decade.
Irony to the extreme in this case would be to say “the struggle is real.” People have been wondering for decades, similarly, when Amazon is going to be profitable.
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https://www.space.com/spacex-usaid-starlink-terminals-ukraine
……
Space reporter Joey Roulette tweeted Wednesday that the majority of the terminals — 3,667, to be exact — as well as the associated internet service were donated directly by SpaceX at a cost of “roughly $10 million,” with USAID purchasing the remaining 1,333 terminals. These numbers apparently came from an earlier version of the USAID release; the updated release doesn’t give dollar figures and refers only to 5,000 Starlink terminals donated by a public-private partnership.
Roulette also suggested in another tweet that France and Poland had made contributions to the Starlink shipments to Ukraine, citing an earlier conversation with SpaceX president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell. The USAID announcement only refers to the American partnership, however. Fedorov originally asked for aid on Feb. 26, and the first shipment of Starlink terminals arrived just two days later — a remarkable logistical feat. But it turns out that SpaceX had already been working on the Ukraine delivery for six weeks at that point, initiating the process well before Russia’s invasion, and was simply awaiting permission to enter the country.
SpaceX’s Starlink program is designed to provide affordable, low-latency internet service to remote locations around the world via its ever-growing constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit, with launches adding to the network roughly once every week or two throughout 2022.
Ukraine is not SpaceX’s first humanitarian mission. For example, the aerospace company also sent Starlink terminals to the Pacific island nation of Tonga after a volcanic eruption interrupted communication services there on Dec. 20, 2021.
Follow Stefanie Waldek on Twitter @StefanieWaldek. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
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Haha! Well said Fandango
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*giggles* I would be happy with just 100K of that money.
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Most of us would be, too.
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As for another tech bilionaire and his stuff, I played a stupid pet trick with Alexa, a wee bit ago. Here’s how it goes: Alexa, when was Easter?
“Easter Sunday was on April 17th,
2022, fourteen days ago.”
Alexa, what is today?
“It’s Saturday, April 30th.”
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Very good…..
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We’re heading into an election and one of the minister’s is complaining that he needs a pay rise. 🙄
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😂
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He said if he could be given a number to help homelessness (or something like food poverty) he’d pay it, and they gave him a number. It was less than what he’s paid for Twitter, and he didn’t give them the money.
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Promises, promises.
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I don’t like him. I already have him blocked on Twitter, lol
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I can’t help but laugh at the ending. Lol.
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Bezos says you have to be willing to be misunderstood, and I’d guess you could be right about the password as they find it most comfortable yo “own” it. I don’t subscribe to the “misunderstood” aspect of their fame, except in other ways… for instance, how many people know these companies (spaceX and Amazon) “aren’t” profitable?
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https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-first-private-jet-dassault-falcon-lifestyle-wealth-900b-2022-4#the-falcon-900-is-a-business-jet-first-produced-by-french-aviation-company-dassault-in-the-1980s-1
Musk said he doesn’t own a home, a yacht, or take vacations. “I mean, the one exception is the plane, but if I don’t use the plane then I have less hours to work,” Musk said.
The plane he’s referring to is his Gulfstream G650ER, in which he flew more than 150,000 miles in 2018 alone, per flight records obtained by The Washington Post [Bezos-owned].
Only four jets have been registered to Musk in addition to the Falcon 900B: a Gulfstream G650ER (N628TS) and two Gulfstream G550 (N272BG and N502SX).
…
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Lol yeah! I’d say it is! ❤
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