Reports emerged earlier this week that Chinese leaders were targeting the world’s richest user and sometime Donald Trump adviser Elon Musk as a suitable customer for TikTok, which will be banned in the United States starting tomorrow. TikTok called the reports “pure fiction. ” However, TikTok CEO Shou Chew will be with Musk and other political and business heavyweights at Trump’s inauguration on Monday. Chinese Vice President Han Zheng will also be in the audience, marking the first time a Chinese leader will attend the swearing-in of an American president.
While Musk has been at Trump’s side since November’s election, he has been loyal to China’s ruling political class for over a decade—as any of his 213 million followers on X can attest. Forbes analyzed Musk’s comments about China over a dozen years and across 110 tweets. The posts on X (formerly Twitter), which span from 2011 until the present, offer a window into the evolution of Musk’s relationship with China and raise questions about the growing political influence of Musk, who is poised to play a central role in U.S. policymaking over the next four years as both an advisor to Trump and as head of DOGE, a new organization tasked with trimming U.S. spending.
Initially, before Tesla had business there, Musk was frosty towards China, but he changed his tune once he began lobbying the country’s leaders to build a massive Tesla factory in Shanghai. While he has never mentioned China’s president Xi Jinping by name, nor commented on controversial topics like the internment of the Uygur ethnic minorities in China’s Xinjiang province, he does talk about topics related to his businesses, both Tesla and SpaceX. In dozens of tweets, Musk has hailed China’s infrastructure and high-speed rail system, praised its space program, complimented its green energy policies, and encouraged his followers to visit the country. Twice, he responded to, or tagged, accounts run by Chinese state-owned media.
Musk has rarely spoken of the Chinese political regime. Forbes discovered only two times of particular criticism, either from 2012: one article criticized China and Russia for vetoing a UN solution calling for the resignation of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whilst Another accused China of hiding a crisis in its genuine country. genuine estate sector. On two other occasions, in 2019 and 2022, Musk denounced Chinese government policies that impacted Tesla’s business – subsidies to domestic automakers and zero-covid restrictions – without brazenly criticizing the authorities.
Musk’s agreement with Chinese leaders began as early as October 2015, when, on a stopover at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, he showed that he was negotiating with the government to open a factory. At the same time, he began to be publicly liked across China on Twitter. In late 2016, he congratulated China on the launch of a heavy rocket, tagging the Twitter account of the Chinese Communist Party’s official news agency. When a second rocket launch failed, he expressed sympathy for the brands and refuted a user who attacked Chinese production capabilities. “China’s progress in complex infrastructure is more than a hundred times faster than that of the United States,” he said. Musk later.
His pro-China sentiment coincided with his skepticism toward President Donald Trump. After first joining Trump’s business advisory council, Musk announced his departure in June 2017 following Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accords. He then invoked China as a positive counterpoint to the United States. as much blank electrical energy through 2030 as the United States produces today, from all sources,” Musk tweeted.
A few months later in March 2018, when Trump exhorted China to reduce its U.S. trade deficit, Musk – who at that time was struggling to keep Tesla above water – responded in a series of posts, complaining about unequal trade rules between the two countries. “[A]n American car going to China pays 25% import duty, but a Chinese car coming to the US only pays 2.5%,” Musk said. “Also, no US auto company is allowed to own even 50% of their own factory in China, but there are five 100% China-owned EV auto companies in the US.” Despite his concerns, Musk said he was optimistic. “China has already shown a willingness to open their markets and I believe they will do the right thing.”
Trump never responded to Musk’s request, but China did when President Xi Jinping announced he would scale back car import duties four weeks later, prompting public praise from Musk. Then, in July 2018, Tesla signed a deal with the Chinese government to build its factory in Shanghai and secured low-interest loans from Chinese state-owned banks to help finance construction. Tesla has become the first foreign automaker to retain 100 percent ownership of its Chinese subsidiary.
To get the deal done, Musk worked closely with Li Qiang, a top Shanghai official who was elevated in 2023 to China’s premier, behind only president Xi Jinping in the Chinese Communist Party pecking order. “Just finished an amazing 3 day visit to China,” Musk tweeted, jubilant at the deal’s conclusion, adding that he enjoyed a “profoundly interesting discussion” with China’s then-Vice President Wang Qishan, who previously served as the enforcer of the Communist Party’s anticorruption campaign.
“The Chinese state has enormous regulatory powers. Being at least publicly cooperative is a quite common approach,” says Scott Kennedy, a China expert at the Center for Strategic & International Studies.
Chinese Premier Li Qiang meets with Elon Musk, chief executive of U. S. automaker Tesla, in Beijing, capital of China, on April 28, 2024.
The Shanghai factory, which opened in December 2019, provided an enormous boon to Tesla’s business. Its sales in China have increased by more than sevenfold since then. In 2024, Chinese customers bought 36.7% of all Tesla cars, making China the company’s largest market ahead of even the United States. The factory, which also exports cars to other countries, produces over half of all Tesla vehicles. Cheaper labor and input costs in China have boosted Tesla’s operating margins, powering its stock – and Musk’s fortune – to new heights.
“I can’t underestimate the importance of the Chinese market to Tesla, now and in the future, especially as the U. S. and Europe slow or revise subsidies and other similar measures for EV adoption,” said Tu Le, who runs consultancy Sino Auto Insight. “It’s their key market, not only from a sales standpoint but also from a production standpoint. “
While Tesla gained advantages, Musk’s China ambition was also a strategic move aimed at helping boost the country’s domestic electric vehicle industry. Demand for Tesla fabrics spurred the advance of suppliers, such as CATL, which has since become the world’s largest battery supplier. Tesla’s market share in China has fallen in recent years, especially due to the advantages of BYD, which is now the world’s largest electric vehicle manufacturer.
“It created a huge synergy,” Kennedy says. This has been a blessing for Tesla and a blessing for China’s EV industry. “
During the 2024 presidential campaign, when Musk embraced the Republican Party and then Trump, his pro-China perspectives led him to clash with parts of the MAGA coalition, specifically on the sensitive issue of immigration. “Immigrants from China and other Asian countries have made contributions to the United States,” Musk tweeted in February 2023, reacting to a news report about the increase in Chinese immigrants illegally crossing the US-Mexico border. Last March, when his long-time DOGE partner Vivek Ramaswamy lamented the U. S. military’s dependence on China for raw materials, Musk retorted: “The United States and China are incredibly dependent on each other. ” Ramaswamy said in The past on his podcast that Musk would “jump around like a circus monkey when Xi Jinping called when necessary. ”
Musk has toned down his praise for China since Trump’s election victory; On Wednesday, he took some unplanned time to congratulate a Chinese social media influencer who looks like him. “I love my Chinese ego,” Musk tweeted.