Musk: Will Keep Funding Ukraine, Even Though Starlink Is Losing Money

Elon Musk said on Saturday his rocket company SpaceX would continue to fund its Starlink internet service in Ukraine, citing the need for "good deeds," a day after he said it could no longer afford to do so.

Musk tweeted: "the hell with it … even though starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we'll just keep funding ukraine govt for free."

Dmitri Alperovitch, the Soviet-born founder of the Silverado Policy Accelerator, a geopolitics think-tank in Washington, D.C. and a co-founder and former chief technology officer of CrowdStrike, on Saturday demanded to know where the boundaries would happen, if Musk does decide to stop funding Starlink. 

"Will geofencing also be turned off on the front lines where the Ukrainians are launching counteroffensives?"  Alperovitch asked Musk on Twitter, after the SpaceX billionaire's post concerning his decision to continue funding the service. 

Geofencing, by definition, s a feature in a software program that uses either a global positioning system (GPS) or radio frequency identification (RFID) when defining geographical boundaries. It allows administrators to establish trigger actions so that when a device enters or leaves the boundaries that are set up by an administrator, an alert is issued, such as the alerts that are issued sometimes to shoppers entering certain stores. 

Musk said on Friday that SpaceX could not indefinitely fund Starlink in Ukraine. The service has helped civilians and military stay online during the war with Russia.

Although it was not immediately clear whether Musk's change of mind was genuine, he later appeared to indicate it was. When a Twitter user told Musk "No good deed goes unpunished," he replied "Even so, we should still do good deeds".

The billionaire has been in online fights with Ukrainian officials over a peace plan he put forward which Ukraine says is too generous to Russia.

He had made his Friday remarks about funding after a media report that SpaceX had asked the Pentagon to pay for the donations of Starlink.

SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment. The Pentagon declined to comment.]

Newsmax staffer Sandy Fitzgerald contributed.