Musk has cofounded seven companies across the span of his career, including Tesla, SpaceX, the Boring Company, xAI, Neuralink, and Starlink. A December analysis of Musk’s $447 billion net worth by Bloomberg found that the bulk of his value stemmed from his Tesla shares, which grew 71 percent in 2024.
The billionaire’s cozy relationships with both Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, though, might not just benefit Musk’s financial interests. Critics argue that they could dually boost China as it positions itself to replace the U.S. at the forefront of the world stage.
“All these actions create tremendous opportunities for the [People’s Republic of China]. Chinese President Xi Jinping is not shutting down his country’s foreign assistance; he is offering aid, trade, and investment instead,” McFaul, now a political science professor at Stanford, wrote.
The business has been so successful there that Tesla broke ground on another, $200 million Shanghai “megafactory” in May 2024, just three months before Musk threw his weight behind Trump’s presidential campaign. The new operation, which focuses on the production of utility-scale lithium-ion batteries, took 10 months to complete construction. Production is slated to begin on February 11.
And Tesla has pulled off several major coups in China. Musk has spent the better part of the last year actively lobbying Chinese officials to advance the approval of his car company’s self-driving features—a turn that would transform Tesla into a more AI-centric company.
In April, Tesla cut a deal with Baidu, the company behind China’s biggest search engine, that would allow their vehicles to leverage their mapping service to advance the self-driving’s navigation features. Tesla currently plans for cars with “full self-driving” features to enter the Chinese market in Quarter 1 of 2025 “pending regulatory approval.” China has yet to approve this product.
In October, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened a probe into 2.4 million Teslas and the full self-driving feature.
Tesla has also faced heat from the NHTSA over the car’s less advanced Autopilot system, after the agency found 467 crashes involving the effective cruise control feature. Those crashes resulted in 54 injuries and 14 deaths, according to PBS.
The current data collection policy has revealed that Tesla reported more than 1,500 vehicle crashes to federal safety regulators in 2024. And a Reuters analysis of data from the NHTSA found that Tesla’s crash data accounted for 40 out of 45 of the fatal crashes reported through October 15.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, with whom Musk has reportedly had regular contact since 2022, allegedly asked the tech billionaire to avoid activating his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan “as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
In 2023, Musk earned a sharp rebuke from Taiwan after he suggested that Taiwan was an integral part to mainland China, separated from the country “arbitrarily” due to U.S. involvement in its defense operations, and “analogous to Hawaii or something like that.” Taiwanese officials told the billionaire that the island was “not for sale.”
And all of Musk’s goodwill towards China has provided him with an unusually cushy relationship with the foreign country. In mid-January, Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal reported that Chinese officials were reportedly open to selling TikTok to Musk, despite reports from China’s commerce ministry that the country would “firmly oppose” the sale of the massively popular video sharing app.
In a letter to newly confirmed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden warned that Musk’s business operations in China were a fundamental conflict of interest that should prohibit the billionaire from accessing sensitive data and government secrets.
Wyden also accused Tesla of receiving “several unusual concessions” from the Chinese government, including privileges “no other car company” had within the Eastern market. Further, Musk’s advantageous tax and loan rates set by Chinese state-owned banks made the carmaker a liability in the White House, Wyden argued, because those perks could “change quickly if Musk were to anger the Chinese government.”
And Musk’s former Department of Government Efficiency co-chair Vivek Ramaswamy warned in 2023 that he believed “Tesla is increasingly beholden to China.” “I have no reason to think Elon won’t jump like a circus monkey when Xi Jinping calls in the hour of need,” Ramaswamy said at the time, while discussing Musk’s decision to build a battery plant in Shanghai.
That, according to Ramaswamy, was little more than a successful political ploy for Musk to obtain regulatory approvals and tax breaks from the Chinese Communist Party for his Shanghai factory.
(Just months later, during his unsuccessful run for president, Ramaswamy said the U.S. should let China invade Taiwan after securing its own source of semiconductors.)
“Given his investment in China and also given his relations with Chinese leaders, people do hope that he can play a constructive role in the second Trump administration,” Wu Xinbo, director of the Center for American Studies at Fudan University, told the Journal in November.
“As China expands its diplomatic and economic influence around the world, American support for systems of oversight, accountability, and sustainable economic and environmental decisions helps prevent China from entrapping countries in debt and diplomatic subservience and from monopolizing critical minerals or strategic access points, about which the Trump administration is so concerned,” wrote Brookings Institute foreign policy fellow Vanda Felbab-Brown, citing the Panama Canal as an example.
Andrew Natsios, the former head of USAID under President George W. Bush and a lifelong conservative, told Politico that Musk’s snubs against the agency were a “bold-faced lie” and that the administration’s idea to fold USAID’s priorities into the State Department was the “worst idea [he] could possibly imagine.”
In fact, permanent closure of America’s international aid program, which provides humanitarian assistance and funding for infrastructure and developmental tech in developing nations, would prove a “major global calamity,” according to Chris Barrett, a professor of public policy and economics at Cornell University.
Just days into the budget freeze on USAID, the South China Morning Post reported that developing countries that have been historically reliant on USAID “may turn to China for support or other concessional investments in infrastructure projects—unless China offers first.”
The New Republic reached out to Musk via Tesla for comment but did not receive a response by time of publication.
“Chinese leaders remain convinced of the country’s historic destiny to rise and displace the United States as the world’s preeminent power,” Yun Sun, the director of the China program at the Stimson Center, argued in a Foreign Affairs op-ed Thursday. “They think that Trump’s policies will undermine U.S. power and reduce U.S. global standing in the long run. And when that happens, China wants to be ready to take advantage.”
Gutting critical federal agencies, seeding mass distrust in America’s democratic elections and systems, and prioritizing isolationist policies have only opened up more opportunities for China to step into the spotlight. And as the foreign nation’s economy grows—so will Musk’s.
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