Musk confesses to the blackout he blamed on Washington, Pentagon rewards him with more satellite tracking data

…(cont) On October 21, Senate Democrats asked for that oath. Senator Adam Schiff framed the choice as binary: "Either the President was lying or Musk was lying, but the decision to slow down satellite speed and access has life or death consequences for Ukraine." The Senate can compel testimony with a subpoena. It asked instead.

It asked again four days later. On October 25, three things landed in the same stretch: the excuses collapsed into a third, Schiff renewed his ask, and the Pentagon widened the contractor's access. Musk confirmed, in his own name, that he had ordered the throttle, writing that Starlink had been used "for offensive drone strikes to kill people" and calling the country that used it "evil warmongers" — a characterization Kyiv denies. In a separate item that Saturday, the Daily Caller ran Musk's other line for Kyiv: "May you burn in hell." The same day, Schiff said Hegseth should testify on the slowdown, NBC News reported — the second ask in four days, still without a subpoena attached. And The Guardian reported that the Pentagon had handed SpaceX access to restricted space-tracking data, the kind that gives one company a hand on traffic control in Earth's orbit.

The contractor who spent twelve days deciding whose fault the blackout was gets a bigger set of keys while the committee that could compel him to explain it keeps asking nicely. The subpoena is still in the drawer. So is the explanation.