Twelve Years Of Elon Musk’s China Tweets Show Why He’s Such A Key Ally

Earlier this week, reports emerged that China’s rulers viewed the world’s richest person and Donald Trump’s informal adviser Elon Musk as a suitable buyer of TikTok, which will be banned in the U.S. starting tomorrow. TikTok called those reports “pure fiction.” Still TikTok’s CEO Shou Chew will be with Musk and other political and business heavyweights at Trump’s inauguration on Monday. China’s Vice President Han Zheng will also be in the audience, the first time a Chinese leader will attend the swearing in of a U.S. 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 seldom said a bad word about China’s political regime. Forbes found only two instances of explicit criticism, both from 2012: one post criticized China and Russia for their veto of a UN resolution that called for the resignation of Syria President Bashar al-Assad, while another accused China of hiding a crisis in its real estate sector. On two other occasions, in 2019 and 2022, Musk called out Chinese government policies that impacted Tesla’s business – subsidies for domestic automakers and zero-covid restrictions – without overtly criticizing authorities.

Musk’s courtship of Chinese leaders began as early as October 2015 when, during a visit to Tsinghua University in Beijing, he confirmed that he was negotiating with the government on opening a plant. Simultaneously, he began endearing himself to China publicly on Twitter. In late 2016, he congratulated China for its launch of a heavy-lift rocket, tagging the Twitter account of the Chinese Communist Party’s official state news agency. When a second rocket launch failed, he expressed sympathy for the builders and rebutted a user who took a crack at Chinese manufacturing capabilities. “China’s progress in advanced infrastructure is more than 100 times faster than the US,” Musk later claimed.

His pro-China sentiment dovetailed with his skepticism of President Donald Trump. After initially joining Trump’s business advisory council, Musk announced his departure in June 2017 following Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accords—and then he invoked China as a positive counterpoint to the U.S. “Under Paris deal, China committed to produce as much clean electricity by 2030 as the US does from all sources today,” 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 entreaty, but China did as President Xi Jinping announced that it would lower import tariffs on vehicles just four weeks later, drawing Musk’s public praise. Then, in July 2018, Tesla inked its deal with Chinese authorities to build its Shanghai plant, and received low-interest loans from Chinese state-owned banks to help finance the construction. Tesla became the first foreign automaker to maintain 100% 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.

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 understate the importance of the China market for Tesla now and in the future, especially as the United States and Europe are looking at slowing down or revisiting subsidies and things of that nature for EV adoption,” says Tu Le, who heads the consultancy Sino Auto Insight. “It’s their key market, not only for a sales standpoint but a production standpoint.”

While benefiting Tesla, China’s support of Musk’s ambition was also a strategic move to help boost the country’s domestic electric vehicle industry. Tesla’s demand for materials spurred the development of suppliers, such as CATL, which has since become the world’s largest battery supplier. Tesla’s market share in China has dipped in recent years, especially to BYD, which is now the world’s largest EV manufacturer.

“It’s been a huge synergy,” says Kennedy. “It’s been a boon to Tesla and a boon to China’s EV industry.”

During the 2024 presidential campaign, as Musk embraced the Republican Party and then Trump, his pro-China views brought him into conflict with parts of the MAGA coalition, including on the sensitive topic of immigration. “Immigrants from China & other Asian countries have made incredible contributions to America,” Musk tweeted in February 2023, in response to a news story about the rise of Chinese immigrants illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. Last March, when his future DOGE partner Vivek Ramaswamy lamented the U.S. military’s dependence on China for raw materials, Musk pushed back: “Both the US and China are extremely dependent on each other.” Ramaswamy previously said on his podcast that Musk would “jump like a circus monkey when Xi Jinping calls in the hour of need.”

Musk has tamped down his China praise since Trump’s election victory, but on Wednesday, he took time out of schedule to shout a Chinese social media influencer who happens to look just like him. “I love my Chinese alter-ego 😂,” Musk tweeted.