Summary
Carlos Slim’s telecom giant, América Móvil, canceled $22 billion in planned Starlink orders after Elon Musk insinuated Slim had ties to drug cartels.
The decision, made within hours of Musk’s tweet, costs Musk his main partner in 25 countries and shifts business to Chinese and European competitors, further reducing U.S. commercial influence.
Musk’s increasing political entanglements and conspiracy-laden posts are alienating key business partners and consumers, with potential ripple effects on Tesla sales.
It’s nice that Elon is getting hit where it hurts. Hopefully the EU benefits from this.
Hopefully. For all the tragedy of his presidency, Orange Menace actually brought endless opportunities for us to unite and become properly Independent.
Am I the only one that’s not worried about the future? As a non-American I mean, it feels like we’re about to have more global unity and prosperity entirely at the expense of America, whereby it’ll become the futures new “No Man’s Land” of proxy-wars, weapons testing, and religious fundamentalism to satiate the MIC while everywhere else gets to make new trade partnerships and are free to explore more political possibilities without having to pay their dues to Uncle Sam.
Maybe i’m being too optimistic, but it sorta feels like the winds are blowing towards a new global alliance of Europe and NATO teaming up with China, purposefully excluding and at the expense of Russia and USA. Feels like the Cold War superpowers have both lost, Russia successfully defeating USA but not without collapsing themselves too. Almost as though this war in Ukraine was just part of the mechanism to collapse the USA/EU Atlantic alliance, and the war can only be over once Russia and USA are through.
You are forgetting that China and Russia are friends, and always have been. Sure, they have their dust-ups, but it’s never serious. Last summer they were having combined wargames along the Alaska/Canadian coast, and Russian and Chinese jets flew close enough to have our air command nervous. At the same time Russia was touting their alliance with North Korea.
I think the US will leave NATO, but NATO will not align with China. Instead, there will be a new alliance, and America will join Russia, China, North Korea, and a few others (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Hungary, Turkey, etc.) in a new Axis Of Evil.
I’m likely not well informed enough to know for sure, but from what I’ve been gathering is that China Russia relations are more or less based on weapons deals while otherwise remaining neutral and shakey at best. As in they’re sort of “fair weather friends” but I think China has a better future in weapons deals with a United Europe and a collapsing USA and Russia Vs. a future with a collapsing Russia and the likes of Iran or Hungary (Turkey is NATO btw). China certainly wouldn’t approach Europe with a deal, but rather I feel like China is in the position to choose between deals that are coming to them, and while China is certainly not an ideal Big Daddy I feel like they’d do a better job at overseeing more peaceful relations with themselves on top instead of America. Iran and North Korea would get a better deal out of it too than this new Axis of Evil you’re proposing. Everyone just wants USA to collapse so they can get on with their countries without USA’s meddling interference schemes and paying dues to Uncle Sam, that alone would placate a lot of these “Evil Countries” to be more willing and able to be less “evil”. It’s not a solution but it’s progress.
AGAIN i’m most likely wrong, would like to be enlightened further if anyones got some good reads/vids for me.
That is a bit too optimistic, though only by a little. China is still an immoral authoritarian state, and the EU should definetly not overdo any possible deals with them, as not to get dependant on yet another bully. The cheeto man may still straight up team up with his russian overlords and try to screw us in the butts. However, if we play the cards right, stay united, and keep russian-funded politicians away from our parliments, we just might come up on top.
That’s an excellent point. Trump is replacing all the competent people with loyalists, without remembering a basic fact: It is better to keep your potential enemy inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.
All he has done is force all of his most competent leaders to join the opposition, as well as tens of thousands of inside operatives who are now unemployed, but know better than anyone how the system operates. There are are also a lot of people still on the inside, who hate what has happened to their workplace and their colleagues, and won’t be so compliant. They’ll be perfect moles for any espionage/sabotage.
Eventually they’ll get organized, and it will be the competent, motivated Patriots against the treasonous MAGA morons.
Eutelsat and Amazon’s Kuiper just got one more pre-order.
Well, Amazon isn’t exactly great for the EU, but at least it’s not Elon, IG…
Billionaires trying to preserve the status quo are far less dangerous than billionaires trying to disrupt it.
Damning with faint praise, but you’re not wrong. No billionaire getting stuck-in like Musk is doing it to make the world a better place for anyone else, and no one except autocrats and accelerationist wackos should be pleased with how things have changed in the last 6 months.
So? No billionaires at all are better than both cases. Bezos is evil too, any investment going towards him is terrible to. It’s better than Elon, but all this is terrible. Also, Bezos is not trying to preserve the status quo, he’s only trying to protect himself and his pockets, that’s all.
True, but not good enough. Eventually there will come a billionaire who is even more psychopathic than all the others, probably some Nepo-baby who thinks he’s a super-villain-genius because he was smart enough to be born with money. That guy will truly wreck the world more than the current batch of billionaires will.
If we don’t end this power grab by the billionaires, and eliminate them from existence, now and in the future, it will ONLY get worse and worse, until it is the end of civilization.
Bezos is just as evil
Not sure about that, but I can’t really say I disagree, fundamentally.
Shame that he’s going to bring the rest of us down with him
Just when the new EU launcher Ariane 6 is finally fully operational. That’s convenient. https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/europes-ariane-6-stages-first-commercial-launch-2025-03-06/
I’d be very surprised if OneWeb ever launches on Ariane 6. It is not build for cheap LEO launches at all afaik. But maybe some ride shares, who knows.
Let’s bring back being decent to people.
Elon really is his own worst enemy. Buying Twitter was such a bad idea on multiple levels.
Other than the fact that it contributed heavily towards giving trump a win in the election and allowing for the speedrun of dismantling of western democracy and alliances. There’s a reason why a lot of the additional funds to purchase twitter came from dictatorship-like backers, such as Saudis/UAE/etc.
It’s served its purpose for them. They’d have been happy to just dismantle it for 44 billion. Musk gave them so much more than that though.
someone pointed out the trump has a history of making the people that help him succeed get ruined and a lot of his most vocal people from his first term lost everything
Good, Elon seriously deserves to lose it all from this. He threatens to shut off Starlink for Ukraine. He’s a nazi making the core buyers of Tesla take a stance. Governmental subsidies are cut to the bone, but not his SpaceX, yet? He’s more unreliable than Google at this point.
He just wanted a soapbox he could control.
This is a man whose only good ideas have been to buy other people’s good ideas with his father’s blood money.
That’s an uplifting news
and shifts business to Chinese and European competitors,
Well, at least he’s not also pissing off China and Europe as well…
Oh, that’s right, everyone hates Musk
Carlos Slim sounds like an RnB artist
Or Slow Jazz. Or a porn star. [wink wink]
Is he related to Slim Jim?
He should sound like the largest shareholder of the NYT because he’s the billionaire with their leash in hand. He’s one of the better billionaire paper owners since his interests aren’t as actively focused on the US but it’d still be great if he didn’t have extensive influence to control the news.
100%, we should guillotine all the billionaires.
Slim Charles, one of the Barksdale enforcers from The Wire.
Sounds like the leader of a cattle rustling gang in a cheesy western.
Feels so good seeing Elon Musk get kicked in the dick.
He is kicking himself in the dick.
Kinda reminds me of Kanye West TBH.
Kanye is not a gay fish!
But he does like fish sticks!
Great news
Good move from Carlos Slim.
Why those accusations? Did he have hints from anonymous?
Musk just makes shit up, we all know that. Slim has held the title of World’s Richest Man in past years, and Musk is probably just jealous and feeling threatened, so he’s lashing out.
He does childish things like that all the time. Back when he seemed like he was just an amazing tech innovator, before we knew who he really was, he offered to send a submarine to help rescue those Thai soccer kids who were stuck in a cave. It was impossible, there were pathways where it was nearly impossible for one person to navigate, there was no way for a submarine to do it.
So he was turned down, but he was really counting on being the guy to save the day, so he got pissed, and publicly called the guy who was leading the rescue a Pedophile, claiming that he was only trying to save the kids so he could molest them!
That was the moment that I lost nearly all respect for Musk.
4Chan
Good.
Anybody here think that a mexican billionaire can be alive without having ties to drug cartels? Good for him for giving the finger to Musk though.
I’m sure every Mexican billionaire has a private army on their payroll, drug cartel of not.
I mean he does have ties to drug cartels, but you don’t say it
What ties? Can you elaborate?
The cartels are the silent oligarchs of Mexico, you don’t control telecoms in their territories and lands without dealing with them. Just about every politician and business leaders in cartel territory have to deal with em
It’s not really all that different in America. We did a kinda informal merger between organized crime, local government, and big capital. Now we’ve merged in the federal government as well.
Thanks for the business opportunity, Mr. Muskrat.
And here I was feeling good about myself after I canceled an order of 4 units for work. But every magnitude matters, I guess.
