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Sometimes. But sometimes it causes minor diplomatic incidents: the Executive Branch pulled at least a few strings to get Brittney Griner and Evan Gershkovich home. Or five US citizens imprisoned in Iran. The State Department presumably has some judgement in terms of what they consider "wrongful detention," though.
Do we think the Biden / Harris administrations are as favorable to Griner as they are to Musk?
Given the news recently about NASA turning to SpaceX to help bring the two stranded astronauts back to Earth, and pointedly rejecting Boeing's pleas that their Starliner capsule was fit for the task, I'd say they'd probably be more favorable to Musk if he were detained on foreign soil. They clearly don't like the guy, but it would require pigheaded dogmatism to overlook his benefit to the US government and leave him to languish in a foreign prison.
Then again, pigheaded dogmatism would not shock me from these people.
NASA is definitely likely to be his biggest ally for sure, but who listens our cares about what NASA has to say? They are politically irrelevant except as a pork delivery system, which SpaceX a actually threatens. DOD might actually be the most influential voice urging his indispensibility, though their influence over State is likely weak and not enough to overcome the political hatred of Musk combined with the lobbying of the traditional defense contractors. The voting public are largely convinced that Musk is a grifter and a loud mouth, and that the companies he heads would be much better off without him.
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I think that almost exclusively is going to depend on how many voters would be incensed or placated by that decision. Biden's supporters are perhaps more sympathetic to Griner than Trump's, but Gershkovich is a WSJ reporter. Musk has -- and I say this as someone who isn't a particular fan of the man -- managed to make himself centrally important to very public facing political objectives (NASA ISS/Artemis, DOD space launch) and employ tens of thousands of Americans in a way that would almost certainly haunt any politician and his or her party stupid enough to not bail him out.
But Musk is also a rather volatile figure and I could imagine quite a few scenarios in which he loses that central importance pretty quickly and becomes unsympathetic to the average voter.
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That pretty clearly isn't supposed to matter. If it does matter, the fact that it matters should be made as legible as possible, to remove as much misunderstanding as possible from what follows.
To be explicit, you believe that the US government can extend or withdraw protection from foreign laws as it sees fit, more or less arbitrarily, that this power is likely to be used to reward domestic allies and punish domestic opponents, and that this is the normal state of affairs we're currently living in, such that Musk's arrest shouldn't cause an update.
Specifically, you believe that Musk being arrested for first-amendment-protected behavior would be fine, provided it's not the US government arresting him, and despite the fact that it is entirely within the US government's power to prevent his arrest.
Further, you believe this reality to be common knowledge.
Would that be accurate?
Yes? If an American is arrested for hate speech ‘committed’ while in an allied Western country in Europe, what does the US government do? Presently the answer is almost certainly nothing.
I don't have much evidence to support this, but my gut feeling -- which is probably representative of the voters that the politicians are at least a bit responsible to -- is that this will depend on context quite a bit. An American citizen arrested for "hate speech" that happens in Europe and is relevant to European politics (say, participating in a riot in the UK) would be treated very differently than an American tourist arrested for something they posted in America on Twitter last year.
Extraterritorial jurisdiction is complicated and probably doesn't have broad support on either side of the Pond. Europe complains when the US does it, too: the entire Assange extradition thing wasn't, from what I can tell, particularly popular in Sweden or the UK.
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