Elon Musk looked like a man who wanted to be anywhere else. Footage from a state banquet in Beijing showed the SpaceX founder rolling his eyes and sighing as a stream of Chinese business leaders snapped photos of him from across the room, and then approached him one by one for selfies he plainly did not want to take.
The scene played out during President Donald Trump's two-day state visit to China, a trip that brought 17 American CEOs to Beijing alongside dozens of other top business leaders. Musk, the Tesla mogul and SpaceX founder, was among the highest-profile figures in the entourage, and the Chinese side treated him accordingly, whether he liked it or not.
The banquet footage, reported by the Daily Mail, captured Musk visibly irritated as business leaders photographed him from a distance before closing in for personal shots. He began pulling faces. When Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun approached for a photo, Musk reluctantly agreed. That same evening, he posed with Apple CEO Tim Cook, who dropped his own smile the instant he turned and walked away from the camera.
The selfie fatigue was only part of the picture. Earlier during the visit, Musk was seen hand-in-hand with his young son, X Æ A-12, born in 2020 to Musk and his then-girlfriend Grimes, at what was described as an important meeting with China's leadership. The boy wore a blue vest over a white shirt and carried what appeared to be a bag shaped like a Chinese dragon mask.
Bringing a child into a high-level diplomatic setting at Zhongnanhai, the Chinese Communist Party headquarters, is not standard protocol. But Musk has never been a standard figure, and the visit underscored just how much personal gravity he carries in Beijing, a city where Tesla operates one of its largest manufacturing plants and where Musk's companies hold enormous commercial stakes.
Musk's legal and corporate entanglements elsewhere have not dimmed his star on the world stage. A San Francisco jury recently found he misled shareholders ahead of his $44 billion Twitter acquisition, yet Chinese business leaders still scrambled for a moment beside him.
The broader context of Musk's Beijing appearance was the Trump-Xi summit itself, a meeting designed to find common ground on trade, tariffs, Iran, and Taiwan. Trump boasted that "fantastic trade deals" were struck during the visit. China announced it would purchase 200 new Boeing planes, though the expected deal under consideration had reportedly been for 500 aircraft.
Trump called Xi a "friend" and "a great leader." He addressed Xi's remark that the United States might be a declining nation, saying the Chinese president had "very elegantly referred to the United States as perhaps being a declining nation."
"He was referring to the tremendous damage we suffered during the four years of Sleepy Joe Biden and the Biden Administration, and on that score, he was 100 percent correct."
That was Trump's only social media post on the Beijing trip, turning a Chinese leader's pointed observation into a broadside against his predecessor.
Xi, for his part, struck a less warm tone in a readout of the meetings. He said he had "agreed with President Trump on a new vision of building a constructive China-US relationship of strategic stability." He called for expanded cooperation in "the economy and trade, health, agriculture, tourism, people-to-people ties and law enforcement."
But the Chinese president reserved his sharpest language for Taiwan, calling it the "most important issue in China-US relations" and warning that mishandling it could lead to "clashes and even conflict."
"The US side must exercise extra caution in handling the Taiwan question."
Trump, notably, did not address Taiwan during the visit. When pressed on the subject at a stop at the Temple of Heaven on Thursday, he declined to engage. Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity did not raise the issue during a Thursday sit-down interview, either.
The silence is worth noting. In December, Trump approved an $11 billion weapons package for Taiwan, described as the largest-ever arms sale to the island. Those weapons had not yet been delivered at the time of the Beijing trip. The gap between approving the sale and avoiding the subject in Xi's presence raises a question that no one in the traveling press corps appears to have answered.
China's announcement of 200 Boeing plane purchases was framed as a goodwill gesture. But the number fell short. The deal reportedly under consideration had been for 500 aircraft. Whether the shortfall reflects a negotiating tactic, a deliberate signal from Beijing, or simply unfinished business remains unclear.
Musk's own companies were not mentioned in any announced deal. His presence in Beijing, however, speaks volumes about the commercial leverage American tech leaders carry in China, and the leverage China holds over them in return. Tesla's Shanghai Gigafactory makes the billionaire uniquely exposed to Beijing's regulatory and trade decisions.
That exposure has not stopped Musk from drawing controversy closer to home. Mexico's president recently threatened to sue him after he publicly tied her to drug cartels, a reminder that Musk's willingness to wade into geopolitics is not limited to Asia.
Trump left Beijing on Friday afternoon, boarding Air Force One after shaking hands with China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi. He told reporters that he and Xi had discussed Iran.
"We feel very similar about (how) we want it to end. We don't want them to have a nuclear weapon. We want the straits open."
He said Xi would visit the United States "on September 24th or thereabouts," promising the visit would "be reciprocal, like reciprocal trade."
The broader American tech industry is watching these diplomatic signals closely. Regulatory environments at home and abroad are shifting fast, and some states are already losing companies to friendlier jurisdictions as red tape piles up. For CEOs like Musk and Cook, the question is not just what deals get struck in Beijing but what rules they will face when they come home.
Xi's promise that China's door to American businesses "will only open wider" is the kind of language Beijing has used before. Whether it means anything concrete depends on what happens next, on tariffs, on Taiwan, on the regulatory treatment of American firms operating on Chinese soil.
Trump closed the visit on an upbeat note, thanking Xi and saying he considered the Chinese delegation friends.
"I wanna end by saying thank you very much. It's been really a great couple of days."
Seventeen CEOs made the trip. The Boeing deal came in below expectations. The Taiwan question went unasked. And Elon Musk, the most photographed man in the room, looked like he would have preferred to skip the banquet entirely.
The images from Beijing tell the real story of American commercial power in China: everyone wants a piece of it, nobody wants to talk about the price, and the man at the center of the frame whose brand follows him everywhere can't even eat dinner without becoming a backdrop for someone else's photo op.
When Chinese business leaders are lining up for selfies with an American billionaire, it tells you something about where the real leverage sits. The question is whether Washington knows how to use it.
