Elon Musk and the plot to hijack America’s broadband

At 9PM ET on the night of May 28th, a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket sat on the launchpad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The craft was in the middle of a hot-fire test awaiting the arrival of Amazon Leo satellites, the first of 24 batches to be shuttled into low Earth orbit for an ambitious satellite internet venture . The effort was backed by hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, leveraging a Biden-era law meant to address America’s digital divide. But before the satellites even reached the launch site , Jeff Bezos’ rocket exploded into a massive fireball, its wreckage left smoldering on the ground. It was an unintentionally perfect metaphor for a once-in-a-generation attempt to fix the creaky US broadband system, now a flaming mess melting into a slush fund for billionaires. Bezos — along with newly minted trillionaire Elon Musk — has become one of the biggest beneficiaries of Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD), a $42.45 billion broadband expansion program passed as part of President Joe Biden’s 2021 “ Build Back Better ” initiative. BEAD was intended to give long-underserved communities billions of dollars for high-quality, future-proof fiber networks. But under President Donald Trump and a coalition of MAGA-allied tech moguls, Build Back Better has been transformed into “tear down quickly,” leaving states mired in bureaucracy and delays. …