Twitter and Tesla pursuits at odds over Elon Musk’s quiet China go to | Elon Musk

follower of Elon Musk Did not know what to anticipate from his journey to China. Will he speak about Tesla, an organization that has an enormous market and a rising footprint there? Or SpaceX, with its symbolic connection to the US state? Or Twitter, the social community he purchased as a result of “free speech is the muse of a functioning democracy”?

One factor nobody anticipated: silence.

Musk despatched his final tweet late Monday night time. The weird break was solely damaged on Thursday morning when he returned to the USA and Write a post Congratulations to SpaceX for his or her achievements in human spaceflight.

One other chief govt may argue that their two days on mainland China have been a continuous parade of conferences, excursions and dinners, leaving little time for social media posts. However Musk, who has tweeted kind of each day since final June, is no less than perplexed.

Twitter is, in fact, banned in China, though international vacationers and net-savvy locals are sometimes capable of entry it utilizing digital personal networks. However others have been joyful to talk on Musk’s behalf. On Weibo, the Chinese language short-form social community that has flourished in Twitter’s absence, a state information publish stated his go to proved the folly of US coverage to “different” China, in feedback. Translated by the Washington Post. “Even when the White Home agrees with the arguments for decoupling, Musk [of the world] Won’t agree.”

whereas china, Tesla’s CEO met with the nation’s Business Minister Jin Zhuanglong, citing a press release from the International Ministry that Musk hopes to increase the electrical automobile maker’s enterprise within the nation, which is its second largest market. The ministry claimed that Musk had described the economies of the 2 nations as “permissibly intertwined”.

The tour has proved influential among the wider business community. on Thursday morning, It was reported The chief executive of luxury goods company LVMH, Bernard Arnault, was also planning to visit China for the first time since the Covid pandemic. Arnault and Musk are battling it out this week for the position with Musk as the world’s richest man. Advance to the French As Tesla stock climbed and LMVH shares fell.

China’s importance to Tesla has long sat uneasily with Musk’s investment in Twitter. Until it took over the social network, it was popular to take An increasingly strong stance Against efforts by the Chinese state to use the Service for propaganda purposes. News feeds such as those tagged as “official media” by the agency Zenova, while personal accounts of Chinese diplomats and civil servants using the site under special dispensation were marked as “officials”. Those labels were removed as part of Musk’s controversial overhaul of the platform’s verification process.

Another Twitter project, the company’s Moderation Research Consortium, shared details with researchers around the world of travel accounts run by state actors, including China. Up to three years Musk’s $44bn acquisition last October, Twitter published details about Chinese “state-linked information operations”. The project is now inactive, and its twin heads at Twitter — security and integrity lead Yoel Roth and legal, policy and trust lead Vjiaya Gadde — have been some of the highest-profile victims of Musk’s massive layoff at the company.

Even before Musk took over Twitter, the sparks of interest were clear. In April last year, New York Times reporter Mike Forsyth noted that China had no leverage on the platform since it banned the service in 2009, but that the country was important to Tesla as both a market and a supplier. Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, responded to Forsythe, Ask if the musk is in possession Does that mean “the Chinese government just got a small advantage over the city square?”

Over the year, Musk has not directly responded to criticism of the distribution incentive. But pressure on Twitter’s general ties to foreign governments has sparked a fiery backlash. After journalist Matt Yglesias pointed out that Twitter had chosen to comply with requests from the Turkish government to remove content in the wake of the national election, in apparent contrast to Musk’s claim to be a “free speech autocrat,” Musk responded, Call him an “unbearable numbskull”. It was his last Twitter exchange before arriving in China.