Musk’s China ties could lead to issues for Twitter
Tesla CEO’s investments face risk if social media platform irks Communist Party
SAN FRANCISCO — When Elon Musk opened a Tesla factory in Shanghai in 2019, the Chinese government welcomed him with billions of dollars’ worth of cheap land, loans, tax breaks and subsidies. “I really think China is the future,” Musk cheered.
Tesla’s road since then has been lucrative, with a quarter of the company’s revenue in 2021 coming from China, but not without problems. The firm faced a consumer and regulatory revolt in China last year over manufacturing flaws.
With his deal to take over Twitter, Musk’s ties to China are about to get even more fraught.
Like all foreign investors in China, he operates Tesla at the pleasure of the Chinese authorities, who have shown a willingness to influence or punish companies that cross political red lines. Even Apple, the world’s most valuable company, has given in to Chinese demands, including censoring its App Store.
Musk’s extensive investments in China could be at risk if Twitter upsets the Communist Party state, which has banned the platform at home but used it extensively to push Beijing’s foreign policy around the globe — often with false or misleading information.
At the same time, China now has a sympathetic investor who is taking control of one of the world’s most influential megaphones. Musk said nothing publicly, for example, when authorities in Shanghai shut down Tesla’s plant as part of the citywide effort to control the latest COVID-19 outbreak, even after lambasting officials in Alameda County, California, for a similar step when the pandemic began in 2020.
“It’s concerning to think about what could be a conflict of interests in these situations, looking at disinformation that could come out of China,” said Jessica Maddox, an assistant professor of digital media technology at the University of Alabama. “How would he, as now an owner of this company, handle that since all of his investments are tied up there, or most of them?”
Even Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and one of Musk’s biggest rivals in tech, space and now media, weighed in — on Twitter — to question China’s potential sway over the platform. “Did the Chinese government just gain a bit of leverage over the town square?” Bezos wrote.
Musk has not detailed his plans for changing Twitter except to promise to free it up as a platform for free speech, while banning bots and artificial accounts that populate its user base.
Even that simple pledge on bots could irk China’s propagandists, who have openly bought fake accounts and used them to undercut claims of human rights abuses in Xinjiang.
As Twitter’s new owner, Musk may well face Chinese government pressure on several issues. They include not only demands from authorities to censor information online even outside China’s Great Firewall — descriptions of Taiwan as anything but a province of China, for example — but also the arrests of Twitter users in China.