Trump brought a dozen of America's most powerful CEOs to Beijing this week — Jensen Huang, Tim Cook, Elon Musk, and others — to meet with Xi Jinping. The optics were big. The results were not. And the whole experience was presumably a nightmare for Trump's emotional-support CEOs.
Here's why: these companies aren't trying to expand into China. They're trying to hold onto what they already have — and in most cases, they're losing it anyway. Tim Cook has built Apple's entire supply chain around China. Nvidia has gone from 95% AI chip market share in China to nearly zero. Musk is trying to sell Teslas in a country that views Starlink as a military threat.
The world that made Silicon Valley possible — the open-market, borderless-money era that began when China joined the WTO in 2001 — is over. And no amount of diplomatic face time with Xi Jinping, or plane rides with Trump, is going to bring it back.
The CEOs Flying to China with Trump Need Xi Jinping Far More Than He Needs Them
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.
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