After buying Twitter in October for $44 billion, Elon Musk now controls five companies operating in the transportation, aerospace, health, telecommunications and social-media sectors. All of them intersect with government to varying degrees, giving the billionaire unmatched global clout and making him close to untouchable, Bloomberg reported.
Despite cooperating with the Biden administration, Musk is actively flirting with the Republicans, thus seriously irritating the Democrats.
Washington is reportedly already discussing ways to limit the entrepreneur's influence and does not rule out that the government may someday "need to break up Musk's empire as it did John D. Rockefeller's more than a century ago."
Moreover, the Biden administration is concerned about Tesla's growing footprint in China and Musk's dependence on funding from the Middle East for his Twitter deal, allegedly leaving him vulnerable to foreign manipulation.
Indeed.