If Twitter owner Elon Musk is a security risk, what about Tesla?

It seems far-fetched that this could actually derail the Twitter deal and it is unclear which agency would have the authority to conduct such a review, although the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS Quoted as a skew vector. At the same time, Twitter’s stock fell by 5 percent on Friday morning. And these are crazy times in America. So if the Fed scraps the deal on national security grounds, it could raise the stakes for Musk’s car company.

Because, as Musk never tire of explaining, Tesla isn’t just a car company. By his saying, it is a powerhouse of energy, technology and artificial intelligence, all rolled into one. It’s an argument-adjacent justification for Tesla’s $650 billion market cap. In addition to the battery, over-the-air software updates and an expanded suite of driver-assistance technologies called Autopilot and Full Self Driving, Tesla touted development of a humanoid robot called Optimus. In fact, should Tesla really crack autonomous driving, its cars will essentially be a special kind 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 1980s. In addition to wheels with its own mind, AI touches a wide range of applications, both military and civilian; Everything from vacuum cleaners to drones. As vehicles become more connected and more intelligent, they become not only a source of national competitive strength, but also a target of potentially dangerous hacking and mass surveillance. Remember how China banned Tesla from military installations last year?

If this all sounds a little crazy, welcome to America, where paranoia is a resilient political virus: never dead, sometimes dormant, sometimes virulent. An agency like CFIUS, which was originally empowered to reject deals in the 1980s when Washington was hyperventilating in Japan, is the very embodiment of paranoia. Two recent landmark laws, the Chips and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, are devoted to varying degrees to combating China. In addition, of course, there is a proxy war with the old adversary Russia.

It still seems a stretch to think that Musk’s apparent gamesmanship would block his deal — though morally repugnant — with access to Ukraine’s Starlink satellite-internet service and surrounding him with Kremlin officials on Twitter. Again, it is not clear to me who will conduct these reviews. But the question, as is often the case, is why did the Musk court take such an unnecessary risk in the first place? His past feuds with the Securities and Exchange Commission and various state and federal traffic safety agencies have been entirely self-generated.

Of all the weapons of the government, the national security complex is perhaps the riskiest. While the never-ending game of eight-dimensional chess played on Twitter raises the possibility that Musk is hoping the cavalry will ride to his defense on Twitter, the cavalrymen ride much more. Even if it happens here, Musk’s prominence and fortune are tied into his promise of developing and owning the technologies that define 21st century life – and geopolitical rivalry. He is a person of interest to Safety Hawk by default. His Twitter habit, whether it’s financial or the thumb expression of his incontinence, gives him unnecessary openings.

This story has been published without modification in text from a wire agency feed.