China loves Elon Musk and his hustle — but Trump could complicate that

Elon Musk loves China, and China loves Elon Musk. But as the idiosyncratic Tesla CEO takes on a high-profile role as “shadow president” in the incoming Trump administration, he could soon find himself performing a geopolitical juggling act.

China’s favorite Western CEO, whom many in the country see as a symbol of entrepreneurial success and technological innovation, often receives a red-carpet welcome when he appears in China and is among a handful of foreign executives who have met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping multiple times.

On Chinese social media, people gush about Musk’s “pioneering spirit” and compare him to Iron Man, the businessman-turned-superhero comic book character.

“I have a lot of fans in China,” Musk said on an April visit to Beijing, according to Chinese state media. “Well, the feelings are reciprocated. I’m a huge fan of China.”

Musk’s Chinese fans admire his penchant for hard work and willingness to take on daunting technological problems.

“Let me put it this way, if I had to pick the greatest person in human history, it has to be Musk,” said Liang Kailai, CEO of a Wuhan-based marketing consultancy who started a Musk fan club in 2021, when the billionaire was named the richest person in the world. He now runs fan accounts on social media with tens of thousands of followers and has, he said, convened fan events in two dozen cities across China.

Musk’s rise to fame and fortune resonates in China, said Dan Wang, a fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center.

“Elon Musk achieved wealth in a kind of recognizably Chinese way, which is more about the hustle than about through any elite pedigree,” Wang said. “He works 996,” he added, referring to the Chinese work practice of working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week.

And among China’s ruling class, Musk is seen as a sympathetic foreigner who can be counted on to praise China as “amazing” and echo Beijing’s talking points on political issues such as the status of Taiwan.

Musk hasn’t said much publicly about China since Donald Trump’s election victory, however, beyond complimenting China’s space program on X the eve of the election.

Musk’s business empire depends on this mutual love fest: China is Tesla’s second-largest market, after the United States, and China is home to one of Tesla’s two international gigafactories. That gigafactory, in Shanghai, produced its 3 millionth car in October.

Meanwhile, Musk is awaiting Beijing’s approval to launch full self-driving systems in the country, according to Chinese state media, a crucial step for the company’s ability to jockey for market share in China’s competitive EV industry. Tesla did not respond to requests for comment.

But things could soon get complicated for Musk, who is constantly at Trump’s side and has taken on a host of unofficial roles in an administration that’s readying to take an extremely hawkish stance on China. That will especially be the case if the CEO can’t moderate Trump’s China policy.

Signs of escalating U.S.-China tensions are already emerging: After Trump vowed last month to implement additional 10% tariffs on Chinese goods, Beijing hit back with a series of retaliatory measures against U.S. technology and defense firms.

Musk has interests in related areas: SpaceX, his space company, is a key contractor to the U.S. military, and he runs a social media platform that is banned in China.

Starlink, the satellite business operated by SpaceX, is a particular point of friction in his relationship with Beijing. The PLA Daily, a Chinese military publication, wrote that Starlink, a Pentagon contractor which has been used in Ukraine’s fight against Russia, represents a “tool for the U.S. to achieve space hegemony.” SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.

For now, though, Musk seems immune to the criticism his companies sometimes face.

Johnny Bi, a 40-year-old Chinese software engineer who lives in Thailand and admires Musk from a “purely tech perspective,” pointed out that Musk’s popularity is boosted by Chinese state media’s selective emphasis on “positive messages” about the billionaire.

An article last month in the People’s Daily, the official Communist Party mouthpiece, lavished praise on Tesla, for instance, and a piece in the state-run Beijing Daily last year described Musk’s views on the U.S.-China relationship as “rational” and “valuable.”

Musk’s controversial posts on X, which have made him an increasingly divisive figure in the United States, do not make it through China’s censorship apparatus.

Perhaps partly due to this favorable coverage, a frenzy surrounds all things related to Musk in China. Chinese media obsesses over his culinary choices, including his dinner menu at a Beijing fine dining establishment last year.

His 76-year-old mother, Maye Musk, also enjoys a high profile in China and has had several brand promotion deals with Chinese companies, including a mattress firm.

“People love Maye because she raised such a successful child,” said Chris Sun, an entrepreneur who translated Walter Isaacson’s recent biography of Elon Musk into Chinese. “Parents in China, they love educating their kids, and they love to pave the way for their kids in the future,” Sun said. Maye Musk’s manager declined to comment.

Musk’s celebrity is such that a Chinese impersonator boasts 1.3 million followers on TikTok, where he posts videos of himself speaking broken English in front of a Tesla. In one popular clip, a shirtless “Musk” overpowers a Mark Zuckerberg dummy, simulating a cage fight between the two tech moguls.

Liang’s fan club, which is mostly populated by male tech workers and entrepreneurs, has organized events on “finding the Chinese Musk” where would-be billionaires try to draw lessons from the Tesla CEO’s business endeavors.

“Many in China see him as a success to learn from, and a trailblazer to watch,” said Liang, adding that the scale of Musk’s ambition isn’t present in the Chinese business world.

Musk does, of course, have his detractors. One Chinese social media commentator called Musk a “carpetbagger,” criticizing his political swing to the right as opportunistic, while others express concerns that he is a “misogynist” or “narcissist.”

Bi, the software engineer, warned that if Musk falls out of Beijing’s favor, Chinese state media coverage could swiftly turn negative. Some Western companies have learned this the hard way, facing popular backlash and boycotts after political missteps.

“For the next four years, how the public in China views Musk will depend on how well China-U.S. relations pan out under Trump,” Bi said. “And honestly, Musk is not the savvy politician he believes himself to be.”