And then Elon Musk said there’ll be no more war – not via his satellite. Aren’t we lucky to have the world in his hands? | Marina Hyde

The tech deity reportedly shut down his Starlink system to foil a Ukrainian attack. Is he the guiding force we need right now?

When Elon Musk posted a personally crafted 280-character peace plan" for the war in Ukraine last October, a Ukrainian diplomat offered a carefully considered review. It ran to a full two words: Fuck off". This week's allegations that Musk shut down his Starlink system (on which the comms-shattered Ukraine relies to defend itself against Russia) right in the middle of a counteroffensive last year - apparently deliberately to neuter it - forces a new question. When he does finally make it there in his big space rocket, will even Mars be far enough for Elon Musk to fuck off to?

For now, it's time to take another turn around the block with Phoney Stark, as Musk's biographer Walter Isaacson reveals that the edgelord magnate (and edgelord magnet) ordered his engineers to switch off the Starlink satellite communications network during a surprise attack on the Russian fleet in Crimea last year. Or to disrupt" the attack, as CNN puts it, still clinging embarrassingly to the preferred Silicon Valley argot that surely ought to have been discredited once its boy kings started becoming more powerful than many of the world's actual countries. I can't help feeling that the benefit-of-the-doubt era with these guys ought to have officially ended back when Y2K fashion was just fashion. Yet until very recently, Musk was still being breathlessly judged a net good to humanity, what with his electric cars and his hyperloops and the fact he once smoked a joint on a podcast. So! Very! Cool! Elon was endlessly covered by the media as a kind of fascinating, eccentric inventor, as opposed to someone with a vast amount of power who should be held to account accordingly. Just as it was with Mark Zuckerberg before him, by the time people realised a lot of what was happening, it was rather too late.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist