Newsrooms, meanwhile, are updating their stories in the wake of the mischaracterization. A spokesperson for his publisher Simon & Schuster told me on Monday that “future editions of the book will be updated” to no longer include the error. Now, Isaacson is having to grapple with an embarrassing problem. Isaacson, a professor of history at Tulane University and former head of CNN, has for years enjoyed such a sterling reputation in the media industry that newsrooms have often taken his reporting to be fact. The correction has cast a pall over the biography from Isaacson, a highly respected author who has written acclaimed biographies on historic visionaries, including Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein. “He now says that the policy had been implemented earlier, but the Ukrainians did not know it, and that night he simply reaffirmed the policy.” “Based on my conversations with Musk, I mistakenly thought the policy to not allow Starlink to be used for an attack on Crimea had been first decided on the night of the Ukrainian attempted sneak attack that night,” Isaacson added in a follow up post. “They asked Musk to enable it for their drone sub attack on the Russian fleet.” “To clarify on the Starlink issue: the Ukrainians THOUGHT coverage was enabled all the way to Crimea, but it was not,” Isaacson posted on X, effectively reiterating what Musk had said. Perhaps more importantly, Isaacson subsequently walked back the bombshell claim, which had received significant media coverage and was published as an “untold story” book excerpt in The Washington Post. “If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation,” Musk wrote. Musk pushed back last week, writing on X that Starlink was never activated over Crimea and that he had actually received “an emergency request from government authorities” to enable the service, with the “obvious intent being to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor.” That explosive claim, which set off alarms and triggered a tsunami of questions about Musk’s role as a key figure potentially determining the fate of Vladimir Putin’s ruthless war, turned out not to be quite as Isaacson had told it. “As a result, when the Ukrainian drone subs got near the Russian fleet in Sevastopol, they lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly.” “He secretly told his engineers to turn off coverage within 100 kilometers of the Crimean coast,” fearing the sneak attack would lead to a “mini-Pearl Harbor” scenario and nuclear war, Isaacson wrote in the book, according to an excerpt obtained and first reported by CNN. Isaacson reported in his book that Musk had abruptly turned off Ukraine’s access to his Starlink satellite internet system last year just as the country was launching an underwater drone attack on a Russian fleet in Crimea, depriving the Eastern European country’s forces of critical communications for the assault and rendering the offensive a failure. Walter Isaacson’s highly anticipated biography on Elon Musk is hitting shelves on Tuesday - and he is already walking back a major claim.
0 kommentar(er)
