Report: FAA to cancel Verizon contract in favor of Elon Musk’s SpaceX
Remember when Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman said they didn’t think Musk would use his position in government to hurt competition?
Remember a few long months ago when Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos (who competes with Elon Musk in his AI and rocket businesses) and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (who competes with Musk in his AI business) downplayed the likelihood that Musk would use his government position to hurt competitors?
The Washington Post is reporting that the Federal Aviation Administration is close to canceling its 2023 $2.4 billion communications system overhaul contract with Verizon, and giving the contract instead to Musk’s SpaceX, whose Starlink satellite business competes with Verizon.
It appears Musk, who recently posted on his social media platform, “The Verizon system is not working and so is putting air travelers at serious risk,” might in fact be using his leadership position at the Department of Government Efficiency to hurt others and help himself.
To reiterate, in December, Altman said:
“It would be profoundly un-American to use political power — to the degree that Elon has it — to hurt your competitors and advantage your own businesses. I don’t think people would tolerate that and I don’t think Elon would do it.”
Bezos at the time said:
“I take it at face value what has been said, which is that he is not going to use his political power to advantage his own companies or to disadvantage his competitors. I could be wrong about that but I think it could be true... I’ve had a lot of success in life not being cynical, and I’ve very rarely been taken advantage of. It’s happened a couple of times, but not very often.”
For what it’s worth, even Verizon doesn’t quite seem to understand what’s happening to it.
Verizon Executive Vice President Joseph Russo said at an event earlier this week that Starlink’s efforts at the FAA might work in unison with Verizon’s.
“I think that can be complementary to what we’re trying to build to really run the FAA infrastructure,” Russo said. “We’re in the midst of rolling out that network. It is not operational yet today but will be shortly as we continue to build in additional reliability and performance at the FAA.”
