Elon Musk might have some plans that don't jive with, well, Twitter shareholders, Charlie Gasoline and what's going on

All right, Twitter stock tumbling today, and a lot of people are trying to figure out whether it means that Elon Musk or all of this is happening because Elon Musk might have some plans that don't jive with, well, Twitter shareholders, Charlie Gasoline and what's going on.

Not just Twitter shareholders, Neil. It's the federal government. So there's a big body of a big agency in the federal government that a lot of people don't know about it. It's called ciphers. The Committee on Foreign Investments in the US. And what they are threatening, or at least opening up an investigation into whether Musk's use of foreign investors might violate some sort of a national security addict. And listen, this is the committee that Trump used essentially was attempting to use to get TikTok banned from the US. And they do have power. Now, whether minority interests in a company or a takeover, because, remember, he will be the majority owner. Finance, which is a Chinese company, I think Qatar's sovereign wealth fund and maybe Prince Alwali of Saudi Arabia would be minority investors, but they wouldn't be owners. OK, so whether that qualifies as something that Cyfias can stop is unclear. But clearly, this is being investigated. Bloomberg was first reported, I understand it as well, and it could be serious. But again, we don't know. I don't know how far CFIUS is power. I don't think anybody knows really how far CFIUS is power.

Can it extend to minority owners in a bigger deal where the majority owners, clearly someone who has national security clearance Starlink forced Elon Musk to get national security clearance and he has it to do those space flights?

That is absolutely true, Neil. Look at it this way. He's paying 44 billion way overpaying for this thing. It doesn't make money. It has a lousy cash flow. I think he's paying 40 billion more than it's worth. And I'm not the only one who thinks that. If that's the case, in order to make the numbers work, you got to lay people off. The problem that he's going to have, Neil, is that despite the fact that Twitter is a lousy business, it's extremely capital-intensive because you got to monitor the bots, you got to monitor bad behavior. There's a lot that goes into essentially putting a tweet out, and now he wants to put a bug in there that allows you to edit your tweets. That's very capital-intensive. So how you sort of justify laying off people and expanding Twitter and keeping it up to date is going to be difficult, but that's where it is.