If Musk Owning Twitter Is a Security Risk, What About Tesla?
Might Elon Musk be saved from the madness of his deal for Twitter Inc. by paranoia? Bloomberg News had a bombshell scoop Thursday night reporting that Biden administration officials, viewing Musk as a little too Russophilic, are weighing security reviews for his various ventures. Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, could be an obvious target, as could that social media platform he is about to buy. But what about the big kahuna, Tesla Inc.?
It seems far-fetched that this could actually derail the Twitter deal and it's unclear which agency would even have the authority to conduct such a review, although the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, is cited as an oblique vector. On the other hand, Twitter's stock is down 5% Friday morning. And these are paranoid times in the US. So if the Feds did squish the deal on national security grounds, it could raise the stakes for Musk's car company.
Because, as Musk never tires of explaining, Tesla isn't just a car company. By his telling, it is an energy, technology and artificial intelligence powerhouse all rolled into one. That is the logic-adjacent justification for Tesla's $650 billion market cap. Besides batteries, over-the-air software updates and the expanding suite of driver-assistance technologies, dubbed Autopilot and Full Self Driving, Tesla touts the development of a humanoid robot called Optimus. Indeed, should Tesla ever actually crack autonomous driving, its cars would essentially be a specialized type of robot.
Autonomous vehicles and AI go hand in hand and have long been of interest to strategic planners around the world. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, began work on unmanned ground vehicles in the
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