Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, has often been lauded in this commentary — regarding SpaceX and the growth of private space travel, and recently for providing crucial internet access through his company’s Starlink satellites first to Ukraine and now for Iranian protesters.
I like that.
But the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) doesn’t like it at all. As Musk acknowledged last week in an interview with the Financial Times (FT), explaining that Chinese rulers wanted “assurances” he would not provide Starlink internet to the 1.4 billion people they actively repress.
With a Tesla plant in Shanghai, Musk is much more vulnerable to the dictates of Xi Jinping and the CCP than he is to Vladimir Putin or Iran’s Ayatollah.
“Tesla, though headquartered in the U.S.,” Forbes notes, “made about half of its cars last year in mainland China, the world’s largest auto market.”
Which amounts to an awful lot of leverage.
In that same FT interview, Musk floated a “solution” to the tensions between China, which threatens a military attack that might kill millions, and its target Taiwan, which overwhelmingly favors a war of resistance to CCP takeover and threatened re-education.
“My recommendation,” the usually innovative businessman told FT, “would be to figure out a special administrative zone for Taiwan [under China’s authority] that is reasonably palatable,” adding, “it’s possible, and I think probably, in fact, that they could have an arrangement that’s more lenient than Hong Kong.”
While the Chinese ambassador to the U.S. thanked Elon Musk for his idea, a senior Taiwanese official reminded, “The world has seen clearly what happened to Hong Kong.”
Does this brilliant businessman really think that the promise of a more “lenient” totalitarianism is any kind of solution?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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3 replies on “Musk Gone Mad?”
Musk is well aware that he’s not proposing a resolution that would hold, let alone one that would be appropriate. But he’s not willing to forgo the billions of dollars that would be lost in alienating the Chinese state, and so he says absurd things.
If he’s not an idiot — and I don’t think that he is — he knows full well that, even if he plays along with the Chinese state, it will someday seek to expropriate as much of the holdings of his enterprises as it can. I very much doubt that he has a swift exit strategy planned, but it surely would be nice.
Can’t bargain when they have a gun.
And you don’t.
No sympathy for Musk. He’s just another globalist. He is reaping what he sowed by building his cars in Shanghai. He will work with totalitarians if the price is right. Other people’s freedom is second to his own business interests.