Elon Musk, one of the richest men in the world, loves to tweet. Today he decided to tweet his opinions on Ukraine, prompting Ukrainian diplomats and politicians to, literally, tell him to fuck off. In typical Musk fashion, he doubled down and kept offering his unsolicited opinions about a war half a world away.
The problem started just after noon on Monday when the billionaire tweeted out a suggestion for a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia that would see Ukraine cede annexed territory to Russia. “Redo elections of annexed regions under U.N. supervision. Russia leaves if that is the will of the people. Crimea formally part of Russia, as it has been since 1783 (until Khrushchev’s mistake). Water supply to Crimea resumed. Ukraine remains neutral,” he tweeted above a simple “yes or no” poll. Russia occupied and annexed Crimea in 2014.
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“This is highly likely to be the outcome in the end—just a question of how many die before then. Also worth noting that a possible, albeit unlikely, outcome from this conflict is nuclear war,” he said in follow up tweets. As of this writing, 1,195,857 have voted in the poll with 63 percent voting no and 36 percent voting yes.
Andrij Melnyk, an international lawyer and Ukrainian diplomat responded harshly. “Fuck off is my very dipolomatic reply to you @elonmusk,” he said on Twitter.
As the poll slid out of Musk’s favor, an NFT-avatar rando responded by saying that “Ukrainian bots” would spam the poll. “The bot attack on this poll is strong!” Musk responded.
Not hearing the answers he wanted, Musk put up another poll. “Let’s try this then: the will of the people who live in the Donbas & Crimea should decide whether they’re part of Russia or Ukraine.” As of this writing, more than 700,000 people have voted with 55 percent saying yes and 45 percent saying no.
In response, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tweeted out his own poll. “Which @elonmusk do you like more? One who supports Ukraine” or “One who supports Russia?” As of this writing, the split is 89% in support of Ukraine with 11% against.
This is all very stupid. Elon Musk is not an international relations expert and has no grasp of Ukrainian history and its historic and repeated brutalization at the hands of its neighbors. For instance, he once suggested starting a website to rank journalists called Pravda, seemingly unaware that a lauded Ukrainian news organization shares that name. It is doubly stupid because Musk has actually helped Ukraine fight the war by shipping Starlink internet terminals to the country.
Musk loves to insert himself into situations that have nothing to do with him and he throws tantrums when people call him on it. For instance, he once inserted himself into a cave rescue in Thailand and accused one of the rescuers of being a pedophile. Musk’s current pinned tweet is another tweet predicting doom if Russia is not appeased. “Russia is doing partial mobilization. They go to full war mobilization if Crimea is at risk. Death on both sides will be devastating,” he said in the tweet. “Russia has >3 times population of Ukraine, so victory for Ukraine is unlikely in total war. If you care about the people of Ukraine, seek peace.”
