Musk's business ties to China could create headaches for Twitter

SAN FRANCISCO • When Mr 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," Mr 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, Mr 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 firm, has given in to Chinese demands, including censoring its App Store.

Mr Musk's extensive investments in China could be at risk if Twitter upsets the communist state, which has banned the platform at home but used it extensively to push Beijing's foreign policy around the globe.

At the same time, China now has a sympathetic investor who is taking control of one of the world's most influential megaphones.

Mr Musk said nothing publicly, for example, when the Shanghai authorities 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 University of Alabama assistant professor of digital media technology Jessica Maddox. "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 Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, one of Mr 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?" he wrote.

Mr 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. It is not clear whether he will restore accounts or remove labels that identify some of Beijing's most prominent users as state officials.

What is clear is that China recognises Twitter's ability to spread information. The government banned Twitter in 2009 amid ethnic riots between Muslims and Han Chinese in Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang, the western region where the government later started a mass detention and re-education campaign that the United States has declared a genocide.

As Twitter's new owner, Mr Musk may well face Chinese pressure on other issues too. They include not only demands from the authorities to censor information online - descriptions of Taiwan as anything but a province of China, for example - but also the arrests of Twitter users in China.

NYTIMES