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WASHINGTON (AP) — A satellite company owned by Elon Musk has the inside track to potentially take over a large federal contract to modernize the nation’s air traffic communications system.
Equipment from Musk’s Starlink has been installed in Federal Aviation Administration facilities as a prelude to a takeover of a $2 billion contract held by Verizon, according to government employees, contractors and people familiar with the work.
Musk said that the network used by air traffic controllers is aging and requires drastic and quick action to modernize it.
“The Verizon system is not working and so is putting air travelers at serious risk,” Musk on Monday posted on X, the social media site he has owned since 2022.
The emergence of Starlink as a potential replacement for the Verizon-led effort underscores the extraordinary conflicts of interest inherent in Musk’s position as both a senior White House adviser to President Donald Trump and a business mogul in charge of a sprawling array of companies. It is not clear what role Musk might be playing in helping Starlink parent company SpaceX win such business.
“There’s very limited transparency,” said Jessica Tillipman, a contracting law expert at George Washington University. Referring to Musk, she said: “Without that transparency, we have no idea how much non-public information he has access to or what role he’s playing in what contracts are being awarded.”
Former FAA officials also told The Associated Press that they were alarmed at the prospect of Starlink being used as a critical part of the nation’s aviation system without adequate testing, review and debate about its benefits and drawbacks.
SpaceX is angling to use its constellation of satellites to replace an aging ground-based communications system that facilitates the FAA’s text and voice communication, the sources said. The Verizon contract, awarded in 2023, was to update part of that system to a more modern standard relying on fiber optic cables.
Contracting records show that nearly $200 million in work has already been done on Verizon’s 15-year modernization effort to update the FAA’s communications system. A Verizon representative said the company is unaware that the contract is being amended or terminated.
The FAA announced on X on Monday that the agency is testing a Starlink terminal at its facility in Atlantic City and two terminals at “non-safety critical sites” in Alaska. Terminals are ground-based receivers that connect devices or computers to orbiting satellites.
Another FAA contractor, L3 Harris, confirmed it was responsible for acquiring and testing Starlink terminals for incorporation into the FAA’s telecommunications infrastructure network. An L3 Harris spokesperson said the company has been working with SpaceX on the initiative for many months.
Bloomberg News reported earlier about the FAA installing Starlink terminals at its facilities.
Details about SpaceX employees deployed to work on the project are unclear, but three of its software developers appeared on a Trump administration list of government workers given “ethics waivers” to do work that could benefit Musk’s company.
Government ethics laws require that people who could profit from government work either recuse themselves from specific projects or first sell their financial holdings or sever ties with the company that could benefit. Waivers can be granted by the heads of government departments or other officials, but only in limited circumstances.
Ted Malaska, a senior director of application software at SpaceX, got a waiver along with two software engineers, Brady Glantz and Thomas Kiernan, according to the waiver list and LinkedIn profiles. The AP could not determine if the three are still working for SpaceX or the precise nature of work for the federal government.
Malaska posted on social media on Thursday that he had been meeting at FAA headquarters with officials responsible for implementation of the telecommunications modernization.
The FAA contract is not Musk’s only conflict. His acolytes have also taken over many of the operations at the General Services Administration, which controls real estate and contracting for numerous government agencies. GSA currently offers other agencies the ability to launch payloads through an existing SpaceX contract —- putting the agency in a position to direct business toward Musk. The Department of Transportation regulates aspects of SpaceX and his electric car company Tesla. NASA and the Department of Defense are major customers of SpaceX. His brain-computer interface company Neuralink has regulatory issues in front of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
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AP writer Kimberly Kindy contributed from Washington.
The billionaire owner of The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, narrowed the topics covered by its opinion section Wednesday to defending personal liberties and the free market, a pivot away from its traditional broad focus and prompting the news outlet’s opinion editor to resign.
Bezos, who also is the founder and largest individual shareholder of Amazon, said on X that “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”
The move was received by some as an indication that Bezos is making decisions for the storied news outlet with an eye toward avoiding retaliation by President Donald Trump. Bezos, though, cast the change as a modernization from the days when newspapers offered opinions on a broad range of topics. Now, he said, “the internet does that job.”
“We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” Bezos wrote in his post, adding that the new topics “are right for America. I also believe that these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion." Opinions editor David Shipley resigned rather than lead the shift, Bezos said.
“I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t `hell yes,' then it had to be `no.' After careful consideration, David decided to step away,” Bezos wrote.
The pivot echoes the Wall Street Journal's editorial page banner: “free markets, free people.”
The move Wednesday was the latest in a series of Bezos' changes to the legacy news outlet, an award-winning organization that broke the Watergate scandal and whose motto is, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
Weeks before the November election, Bezos announced that the Post would not endorse a presidential candidate, sparking a wave of resignations and thousands of subscription cancellations. The Post’s editorial staff had been prepared to endorse Democrat Kamala Harris before publisher Will Lewis wrote instead that it would be better for readers to make up their own minds. Bezos defended the decision by saying in “a note from our owner” that editorial endorsements create a perception of bias at a time many Americans don’t believe the media, and do nothing to tip the scales of an election.
In January, cartoonist Ann Telnaes quit after an editor rejected her sketch of Bezos and other media executives bowing before Trump — after The Washington Post editor was seen with other executives at Trump’s Florida club Mar-a-Lago.
Last June, Sally Buzbee resigned as executive editor rather than lead a new division as part of a plan to split the newsroom into three separate divisions. The hastily announced restructuring was aimed stopping an exodus of readers in recent years. The new plan included a new division devoted to attracting consumers through innovative uses of social media, video, artificial intelligence and sales.
Some of Trump's top allies tweeted their support for Bezos' move.
“Bravo, @JeffBezos!" posted fellow billionaire Elon Musk. Added conservative commentator Charlie Kirk: “Good! The culture is changing rapidly for the better.”
Bezos' opponents said it was evidence that Bezos was moving the outlet toward Trump and the interests of billionaires.
“This is what Oligarch ownership of the media looks like,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., posted on X, Musk's platform "The second-richest guy in the world, Bezos, owns The Washington Post. He has now declared that the editorial page of that paper is going Trump right-wing. Surprise, Mr. Musk agrees. We must support independent media.”
Marty Baron, Buzbee's predecessor at the paper, told The Daily Beast in remarks published Wednesday there was “no doubt in my mind” that Bezos was prioritizing his business interests over The Washington Post.
Bezos bought the broadsheet and other newspapers in 2013 for $250 million in a surprise move viewed as a demonstration of how the Internet has created winners and losers and transformed the media landscape.
The narrowing of topics will be obvious. On the Post’s homepage Wednesday afternoon, headlines linking to opinion material included “Your showerhead is lying to you” and “What we learned about politics by talking about ... wolves.”