Back in February, billionaire and CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Elon Musk made an odd request to the Kremlin on Twitter.
.@KremlinRussia_E would you like join me for a conversation on Clubhouse?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 13, 2021
In a follow-up tweet which he worded in Russian, he confessed “it would be a great honour to speak with you”.
For reference, Clubhouse is an invitation-only audio-chat iPhone app that lets you create “rooms” and chat with others in a conference-call style set up.
In response to this tweet, initially, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, “This is, of course, a very interesting proposal, but we need to somehow understand what is meant, what is proposed. So first we will somehow check all this, and then we will react.” He also noted that Vladimir Putin does not usually use social media as a tool of communication.
However, on Tuesday, March 2nd, Peskov told reporters they had not received any response, however, and that the matter had probably been a misunderstanding. He also said that the matter was probably closed.
There has been some speculation as to why Musk made this request in the first place. General consensus seems to point towards the fact that after SpaceX, one of Musk’s pet ventures, sent four astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) in November, it also ended Russia’s “monopoly” over being the only country capable of sending astronauts to the ISS.
Since 2011, after the shutdown of American shuttles, the Russian Soyuz capsule has been the only way to ferry astronauts into the ISS. However, with SpaceX doing so recently, that is no longer the case.
Musk is yet to respond in any way.
