Elon Musk is not having a good day. Social media platform X has been crashing all day, I take it. And this is happening worldwide. Musk is blaming a “massive cyberattack.” No word yet on who might be behind this.

Musk also may have blown a big Starlink contract with Italy. The Financial Times is running a story headlined Elon Musk seeks Italian presidential meeting to salvage Starlink deal. Which I can’t read because it’s behind a paywall. But this Daily Kos post provides the story, I believe.

Over the weekend, following the lead of the Trump administration, he [Musk] threatened Ukraine with pulling its access to Starlink—the SpaceX internet service powered by a constellation of satellites, that has given Ukraine the ability to closely coordinate combat activities in the country’s front lines. 

“I literally challenged Putin to one on one physical combat over Ukraine and my Starlink system is the backbone of the Ukrainian army. Their entire front line would collapse if I turned it off,” he tweeted. Nice Starlink you have there. Sure would be a shame if something happened to it. 

This infuriated Europeans like Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, who tweeted, “Starlinks for Ukraine are paid for by the Polish Digitization Ministry at the cost of about $50 million per year. The ethics of threatening the victim of aggression apart, if SpaceX proves to be an unreliable provider we will be forced to look for other suppliers.”

Classy as ever, Musk responded, “Be quiet, small man. You pay a tiny fraction of the cost. And there is no substitute for Starlink.”

Except maybe there is. A French company called Eutelsat is seeing its stock value go through the roof because investors are betting Europe is going to replace Starlink with Eutelsat. I don’t believe Eutelsat has quite the same capabilities, but maybe it’s close enough.

Anyway, back to the Daily Kos post —

Italy was about to ink a deal to spend $1.6 billion for its own Starlink network. After threatening Ukraine with the loss of the service, that deal is now seemingly dead. A desperate Musk is now begging Italian President Sergio Mattarella for a meeting to salvage the deal. How do we know he’s desperate? Look what he tweeted: 

“It would be an honor to speak with President Mattarella.”

Quite the far cry from “be quiet, small man.” Musk may not care about a $50 million Polish contract, but oh, now he would be so “honored” to meet with the Italians given a $1.6 billion deal has been pulled. 

Now that Trump has stabbed Ukraine, and NATO, in the back, and withdrawn all U.S. support from Ukraine, Europe is looking for al alternative satellite communications provider to Musk’s Starlink system. Maybe Starlink will suffer a “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” which is what Musk calls his rockets blowing up. I do think the Europeans need to replace Starlink if possible, as soon as possible, because Musk really might just turn off Ukraine’s access. I wouldn’t put it past him. Note that Ukraine’s Starlink contract is also being subsidized by the U.S. Department of Defense, not just Poland. That could be terminated any minute now, too. See also US threatens to shut off Starlink if Ukraine won’t sign minerals deal, sources tell Reuters.

Yesterday the New York Times published an op ed headlined Musk’s Tweet-Fueled Bubble May Be About to Burst. The author, Mihir A. Desai, is a professor at Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School. So he may be fairly bright. Here’s just a bit —

It is tempting to compare Mr. Musk to the true business titans of the past quarter century such as Apple’s Steve Jobs, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, and Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin. But those individuals created genuinely huge businesses that eclipse anything Mr. Musk has built by any possible metric. While Mr. Musk has built a car company from the ground up — no easy feat — his wealth is largely thanks to a financial cult, one in which legions of dazzled investor-followers have enabled him to launch an ever-growing list of disparate initiatives and provided immunity from critics who question his operational decision-making, his corporate governance, his obscene pay packages, and now his migration into the political sphere.

The high-wire act goes something like this: Dream up a business so ambitious that any setback is trivial and every accomplishment heroic. Identify yourself as the manic genius behind this ambitious business in order to personally capitalize on outsize returns from excited investors. Enlist social media to cement your iconic status, keeping your believers so enthusiastic that their fervor beats back any skeptics who dare to bet against your ventures, even as you pitch more and more fantastical ideas. At this point you hit the flywheel: Other investors, searching for outsize returns, flock to the shares of your other companies, pushing their valuations ever higher, thus fortifying your wealth and burnishing your reputation as a business mastermind.

I take it the professor is not that impressed with Musk. Anyway, now that Musk is so much more visible, in our faces every day, his iconic status is slipping. And his business empire is cracking up. Starlink is one of his few companies that’s really making money right now, which may be why he’s frantic to not lose the contract with Italy. The professor goes through Musk’s businesses and shows the many ways they are not doing well. You’ll want to read this.

See also Paul Krugman, The Paranoid Style in MAGA Policy.

Until very recently most CEOs and large investors were bullish on Trump. But Trump’s dizzyingly erratic moves on tariffs may have finally delivered the message to the oligarch class that the Musk-Trump duo have no idea what they’re doing.

You can see this dawning revelation in stock prices. Let’s be clear: The stock market is not a good measure of how the economy is doing. It is, however, an indicator of the mood of people with a lot of money to invest. Now that reality has begun to set in, the market has given up all of the “Trump bump,” the stock gains that followed Trump’s election victory.

The stock market is not having a good day, either, btw. “After falling more than 1,000 points in afternoon trade, the Dow Jones Industrial Average ended at 41,911.71, down 890 points, or 2.1%,” CBS reports.

Krugman tells us that MAGA is blaming all kinds of conspiracies — George Soros gets mentioned frequently — and Trump claims the stock market declines are the fault of Trump-hating globalists. “I think it is globalists that see how rich our country is going to be and they don’t like it,” Trump actually said. They aren’t gong to adjust their policies no matter how bad things get, in other words. They’ll just blame somebody else.

And if you didn’t read America Is Trapped in a Burning Tesla the first time I linked to it, here it is again.