Twitter and Tesla’s interests at odds in Elon Musk’s quiet China visit

theguardian.com:

Followers of Elon Musk didn’t know what to expect from his trip to China. Would he speak about Tesla, a company with a large market and manufacturing footprint there? Or SpaceX, with its symbiotic relationship with the American state? Or even Twitter, the social network he bought because “free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy”?

The one thing no one expected: silence.

Musk sent his last tweet late on Monday night. The uncharacteristic hiatus was broken only on Thursday morning when he returned to the US and wrote a post congratulating SpaceX for its achievements in human spaceflight.

Any other chief executive could have argued that their two days on the Chinese mainland were a non-stop parade of meetings, tours and dinners, leaving little time for posts on social media. But Musk, who has tweeted more or less every day since last June, is rarely lost for words.

Twitter, of course, is banned in China, although foreign visitors and net-savvy locals are frequently able to access it anyway using virtual private networks. But others were happy to speak on Musk’s behalf. On Weibo, the Chinese short-form social network that has flourished in Twitter’s absence, a state news outlet posted that his visit proved the folly of American policy to “decouple” from China, in comments translated by the Washington Post. “Even if the White House agrees with arguments for decoupling, the Musks [of the world] will not agree.”

While in China, the Tesla CEO met the country’s industry minister, Jin Zhuanglong, prompting a statement from the foreign ministry that Musk was hoping to expand the electric carmaker’s business in the country, which is its second biggest market. The ministry claimed that Musk had described the two countries’