Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free
Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
Elon Musk has claimed a cyber attack on his social media platform X on Monday was orchestrated by “IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area”, the latest in a series of recent troubles for his business interests after he joined US President Donald Trump’s administration.
The billionaire, who has morphed into a fierce critic of the Ukrainian government and its war against Russia, provided no evidence for the allegation, made in an interview with Fox Business on Monday, nor did he claim that state actors were necessarily involved.
Earlier in the day, Musk posted that “either a large, co-ordinated group and/or a country” was responsible for the attack on X, which led to broad outages across the US and elsewhere.
The platform previously known as Twitter has experienced several disruptions since Musk bought it in 2022 and fired 80 per cent of its staff. A spokesman for X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The apparent attack on X, which disrupted service repeatedly throughout the day, capped a bruising few days for Musk’s businesses. Shares in his electric vehicle company Tesla fell 15 per cent on Monday amid a broader market rout. The stock is one of the worst performing in the S&P 500 index so far this year.
Last week, Musk’s SpaceX lost another of its next-gen Starship rockets, which exploded nine minutes after launch, while a handful of large Starlink contracts have been cancelled over his political interventions.
Tesla has also suffered from loud protests outside its dealerships over Musk’s role as the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), which is slashing hundreds of government contracts and firing tens of thousands of federal employees.
Talking to former Trump adviser Larry Kudlow on Fox Business, Musk said his work in government meant he was running his other businesses with “great difficulty”.
“I just don’t want America to go bankrupt,” Musk said, apparently committing to stay in his government role for the time being. He reiterated his goal to achieve $1tn in savings from government spending, which would be about half the annual US budget deficit.
Alongside his role at Doge, Musk — who helped Ukraine’s early war effort by rolling out Starlink internet service in the country — has become increasingly critical of US aid to Ukraine, claiming that the war effort against Russia is a “never-ending graft meat grinder”.
Earlier on Monday, Musk called Senator Mark Kelly a “traitor”, after he posted that he had spent time with troops in Ukraine, and repeated his call for the US to leave Nato.
Read the full article here
