The CEOs Flying to China with Trump Need Xi Jinping Far More Than He Needs Them
Three of the world’s most powerful executives flew to Beijing this week, and it wasn't for the food or the photo op. The stakes for each of them couldn’t be more different — or more desperate.
Elon Musk’s net worth changes by more in a single trading day than most people earn in a lifetime. His time is the most expensive commodity any human being controls, and a trip to Beijing spends whole days of it. And as a CEO whose companies are critical infrastructure for the U.S. government, it isn’t just a question of time or money or the advance teams or the device protocols. A man who counts the Pentagon as a client carrying even a single phone with him into China is a national security event, not just some business passenger. It’s a money-losing diplomatic nightmare for everyone involved.
So why get on the plane?
When China joined the World Trade Organization in December 2001, it transformed global business. The deal — backed by the Clinton administration, and celebrated (fists pumping, corks popping) in the boardrooms of American technology companies — promised mutual benefit through interconnection. Open markets, shared infrastructure, growth without friction. The companies that would one day be known as Big Tech were barely large enough to understand what it was about to do for them. But what they were building — platforms, supply chains, chip architectures — turned out to be perfect for the world the WTO agreement was creating.
That world lasted about twenty years.
On Wednesday, Air Force One touched down in a new world. It landed at Beijing Capital International Airport carrying President Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer — and the CEOs of Apple, Nvidia, and Tesla.
Tim Cook, Elon Musk, and Jensen Huang joined Trump’s first visit to Beijing since 2017 alongside the CEOs of Blackrock, Citi, Meta, and others. (Huang joined as a last-minute addition in Alaska, after Trump called to get him literally on board — Pull over, we gotta grab Jensen.) Musk even brought his son X Æ A-XII to the Great Hall of the People.
Quick aside: Dina Powell McCormick, President of Meta (and one of only two women on the trip) is notable in that she’s there in place of Mark Zuckerberg, whose desperate desire to get his products into China once led him to offer Xi Jinping the chance to name Zuckerberg’s son. (Weird offer. Xi refused.) The American uber-capitalists’ pilgrimage to China is a well-worn one.
At a state banquet Wednesday evening, Xi Jinping told the assembled American executives that China’s door would “open wider,” according to state-backed media Xinhua, observing that U.S. companies are “deeply involved in China’s reform and opening up, and both sides have benefited.”
That’s a gracious way of putting it. It also fails to describe the pickle these three CEOs, and the rest of the American tech sector, are in.
The three men who flew to Beijing aren’t looking to expand their business in China. They’re trying to keep from losing it.
