Elon Musk has joined the group of CEOs who will accompany President Donald Trump on his trip to China to meet with Chinese Leader Xi Jinping.
Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly confirmed on Monday that Musk had accepted his invitation from the White House to visit China with President Trump. In the past, Musk has repeatedly expressed admiration for China’s economy and technological innovations. In recent years, Musk has praised the country’s industrial strength, calling China “an amazing powerhouse of manufacturing” and noting that it “understands very well that solar is the future.” He has also encouraged greater engagement with the country, saying, “More people should visit China.”
Musk has also been very complimentary of China’s space program, which he called “very impressive” — and has observed more broadly that “China has many excellent companies in many industries.” Earlier this year, he even suggested China would dominate the AI race on planet Earth.
“Google will win the AI race in the West, China on Earth and SpaceX in space,” the tech CEO stated. Musk has significant business ties to China through Tesla, which operates its largest production facility in Shanghai and generates roughly a quarter of its revenue from the country.
According to Bloomberg, Musk will join more than a dozen other CEOs and executives on the trip: Apple’s Tim Cook, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, Boeing’s Kelly Ortberg, Cargill’s Brian Sikes, Citigroup’s Jane Fraser, Coherent’s Jim Anderson, GE Aerospace’s Lawrence Culp, Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon, Illumina’s Jacob Thaysen, Mastercard’s Michael Miebach, Meta’s Dina McCormick, Micron’s Sanjay Mehrotra, Qualcomm’s Cristiano Amon, and Visa’s Ryan McInerney.
NVIDIA, Caterpillar, Microsoft, Nike, and other companies with large Chinese interests were absent from the list. The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment on how they’d determined which CEOs to invite on the trip.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC in an interview last week, “If invited, it would be a privilege, it would be a great honor to represent the United States.”
Artificial intelligence will be just one of the high-stakes topics scheduled for the trip. Trump is reportedly pursuing a deal where China would make significant investments in the United States by purchasing American goods, thereby reducing the United States’ trade deficit with China.
The president’s trip to China was originally scheduled for the beginning of April — which would have been a year after the infamous Liberation Day tariffs — but it was postponed after Trump said he wanted to monitor tensions with Iran from Washington, D.C. A White House spokesperson told the Daily Wire’s White House Correspondent Mary Margaret Olohan that while in China, “President Trump will continue doing what he has done over the past year: rebalancing the relationship with China and prioritizing reciprocity and fairness to restore American economic independence.”
Trump will arrive in China on Wednesday evening and will depart Friday evening.
Trump is not the first president to bring American business leaders to accompany him on a trip to visit foreign leaders. In 2010, Obama brought CEOs from major corporations such as GE, Boeing, and PepsiCo on his trip to India that was meant to strengthen U.S.–India economic ties.
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