US President Joe Biden has shown himself open to an examination of entrepreneur Elon Musk’s foreign business by American authorities. “I think Elon Musk’s collaborations and technical relationships with other countries are worth examining,” Biden said in Washington the day after the midterm elections. He doesn’t want to imply that Musk is doing anything wrong. However, an examination is in order.
Biden had been asked if he viewed Musk as a threat to national security. Musk leads, among other things, the electric car manufacturer Tesla and the space company Space-X and recently bought the online service Twitter. For Tesla, China, where the company has a large factory, is an important market. In the roughly $44 billion takeover of Twitter, Musk received money from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud, a subsidiary of Qatar’s state investment fund and cryptocurrency exchange Binance, which was originally founded in China.
the Washington Post reported a week ago that the Treasury Department had asked Twitter for more information about the role of such investors. In particular, it is about whether they could get access to information such as user data. Access to data by Americans from third countries is a major concern of the US authorities and has already led them to take action against the popular video app Tiktok, which belongs to the Chinese group Bytedance.
Since Musk took over the short message service Twitter, it has also been criticized for not taking appropriate action against misinformation in the US midterm elections. And on the eve of the midterm elections in the United States, the new Twitter boss also called on “independently thinking voters” to vote for ex-President Donald Trump’s Republicans.
Tech billionaire Musk also caused a stir a few weeks ago with foreign policy advances that brought him criticism. He suggested making Taiwan a “special administrative region” under Chinese rule. The government in Taipei rejected this as unacceptable. Musk also called for Ukraine to give up Russia’s illegally annexed Crimea and agree to a UN-supervised referendum in its Russian-held territories. Musk sent a first email to all Twitter employees on Thursday, which at least does not involve any foreign policy implications: The employees whom he has not yet fired like so many others are now no longer allowed to work from home.