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Musk Stealing A $2.4 Billion FAA Comms Contract Is Far More Horrifying Than You Think.

It’s not just the open corruption and conflict of interest.

Will Lockett
Predict
Published in
4 min readMar 1, 2025

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It’s fair to say that Musk’s conflict of interest with DOGE is palpable. Over the past 20 years, he has gobbled up over $38 billion in federal contracts and subsidies. Musk wouldn’t be a billionaire without these assets, and unsurprisingly, DOGE isn’t cutting any funding to Musk, even though he hasn’t delivered on many of the contracts, and many were only possible through open corruption (such as NASA HLS). But Musk isn’t satisfied and still wants more. On Tuesday, he claimed without a shred of evidence that the FAA’s $2.4 billion comms system operated by Verizon “is not working and so is putting air travellers at serious risk.” Then, the FAA announced that Musk could swipe this contract from Verizon, as they are currently testing Starlink terminals. Not only is this a terrifying oligarchical level of corruption and conflict of interest, but should Starlink secure this contract, it will place Musk in a position of horrific power.

Okay, so what does Verizon do for the FAA anyway?

Well, they operate their FAA Enterprise Network Services (FENS). This is the FAA’s primary telecom service; it doesn’t directly perform air traffic control but instead is used…

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Will Lockett
Will Lockett

Written by Will Lockett

Independent journalist covering global politics, climate change and technology. Get articles early at www.planetearthandbeyond.co

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