Walter Isaacson Admits ‘I Made a Mistake’ on Starlink When Fox’s Hemmer Asks ‘Did You Screw That Up?’
Elon Musk biographer Walter Isaacson conceded once more to the error in his book about how the Space X owner did not actually cut Starlink off to the Ukrainian military in the middle of an attack on the Russian navy.
As Isaacson previewed excerpts of his book ahead of its release, one of the most shocking parts was an anecdote claiming that Musk secretly disabled Starlink around the coast of Crimea in 2022 while the Ukrainian military was conducting a sneak attack against Russia’s invading forces. Since that story broke, Isaacson has admitted that his framing of the operation was incorrect, that Musk already had a policy in place to disable Starlink’s coverage in the area, and that the Ukrainian military frantically asked Musk to turn on Starlink’s coverage there when they realized the attack wouldn’t work.
When Isaacson joined America’s Newsroom on Tuesday to promote the book, Bill Hemmer started things off by pressing him over the original excerpt.
His explanation:
He was talking to me that night as it was happening. He said ‘We’re not enabling it on the Crimean coast.’ I thought ‘Okay that means he shut it off that night.’ He later said to me, and I’m sure he’s right, that it had been a policy already in place, that he had already decided not to allow — to geofence, it’s called — the Crimean coast. And that night, all he did was reaffirm the policy.
Hemmer called this “a tender issue” in the context of Ukraine’s ongoing war against Russia’s invading military. This prompted him to ask, “Did the book get it wrong? Did you screw that up?”
“Yeah,” Isaacson answered frankly. “I made a mistake in thinking that when he said ‘we’re not enabling it,’ I thought that was a decision he made that night. He actually made it before that, but I think it is the same point, which is he decided not to allow Starlink to be used for this offensive attack.”
Watch above via Fox News.
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