Retired General Has No Idea ‘How We Got in This Mess’ Over Musk’s Government Ties

A top former military official has expressed shock and disbelief at the extent to which the U.S. national intelligence and communication apparatus has come to rely on services provided by companies owned by Elon Musk.

Following his op-ed on the topic this week for The New York Times, Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré spoke with MSNBC’s This Weekend on Saturday to discuss the growing influence of the richest man in the world on U.S. politics, as well as his ties to foreign governments.

Host Michael Steele said to Honoré, “Elon Musk has already shown us in the Ukraine situation, he is not concerned about using that leverage to his advantage against the interests of an ally of the United States, and getting concessions, and getting whatever he thinks that he needs in that scenario. How dangerous is that aspect of this?”

Honoré responded, “Well, right now, we’ve got… we never want to get into a single source of intelligence, a single source of communication. I don’t know how we got into this mess, contracting with one contractor, SpaceX doing rockets for us as well as controlling communications.”

He went on, “There’ve been many reports and suspects [sic] that it won’t optimise to help the Ukrainians. We’ve been dealing in Haiti, and Kenyan forces were only given one Starlink, one Starlink in that fight.”

Honoré then added, “I don’t know how the U.S. government… We’ve got the National Reconnaissance Office, we got Space Command, we got NASA… How in the hell people in Washington have subjugated our intelligence and our communications to a private company, why the hell did we do that?”

Honoré concluded by warning the threat is only “going to get worse,” having previously alluded to the national security risk posed by Musk’s alleged communications with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

As he said earlier in his interview, “I guess this might be the only time I agree with Steve Bannon, [even] he’s questioned Musk’s connections with foreign leaders.”