Elon Musk Promotes Socialism in China

China's Foreign Minister Qin Gang, right, poses for photos with Tesla Ltd. CEO Elon Musk in Beijing, China, on May 30 2023. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China via AP

Commentary

Elon Musk, the wunderkind CEO and co-founder of Tesla and SpaceX, is playing in dangerous sandboxes. On June 20, he proposed a “cage match” with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who accepted the challenge, albeit with the date to be determined. Both tech titans are martial arts enthusiasts.

The fight venue is under discussion, with Las Vegas and the Coliseum in Rome being top runners. A pre-match war of words, complete with base insults, is now reaching the stage of a Musk threat to sue over Mr. Zuckerberg’s new Threads app that mimics some Twitter features.

But, Mr. Musk’s most dangerous game lies far to the east of Las Vegas, in Beijing. There, the challenge is so dire that Tesla Man is apparently being forced to publicly subscribe to socialist ideology to pursue his billion-dollar business venture.

By now, the venture is nearly captured by the Chinese Communist Party and the companies it controls. But hey, what true capitalist wouldn’t turn socialist for the chance to make a few billion more bucks, for as long as the party lasts?

In 2018, Mr. Musk said on Twitter, “By the way, I am actually a socialist. Just not the kind that shifts resources from most productive to least productive, pretending to do good, while actually causing harm. True socialism seeks greatest good for all.”

Mr. Musk is a self-described “free speech absolutist,” yet our daily Tweeter-in-Chief went entirely silent on his own $44 billion platform when he visited China this summer. His unusual self-censorship was likely in honor of Beijing’s laws against the social media company.

Mr. Musk’s Twitter has already complied with over 800 government censorship demands since he took the helm, resisting only 20 percent compared to 50 percent pre-Musk.

On July 6, Mr. Musk again waxed effusive over China’s economic and technological prowess. He ignored inconvenient comparisons like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

“China’s going to be great at anything it puts its mind to,” he told an AI conference in Shanghai via video link.

While Mr. Musk is ready to insult Mr. Zuckerberg at the drop of a hat, he has issued little of his characteristic unvarnished truth against Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s excesses, including totalitarianism and genocide. Mr. Musk apparently doesn’t bite the hand that simultaneously feeds and crushes him. He gives back in spades, which makes him complicit.

Mr. Musk doubled-down on his socialism just two days after Independence Day this year, signing a pledge, along with other China-dependent car manufacturers, to “Adhere to industry rules and regulations, regulate marketing activities, maintain fair competition and not disrupt fair competition with abnormal pricing” as well as “Promote core socialist values, actively fulfill social responsibilities, and take on the heavy responsibility of maintaining steady growth, strengthening confidence and preventing risks,” according to a Bloomberg translation.

Other EV signers included BYD, Nio, and SAIC.

Workers chat under an umbrella outside the Tesla showroom in Beijing, China, on May 30, 2023. Ng Han Guan/AP Photo

The Financial Times noted that “Beijing directed the industry to rein in a months-long price war.”

Mr. Musk, however, was not out of capitalist cards after he appeared to agree to a socialist price-fixing pledge. Two days after signing, Tesla offered consumers a cash rebate. I doubt Karl Marx ever supported cash rebates.

Perhaps Tesla was following the letter and not the spirit of price-fixing? Yet more evidence, if any were needed, that there is apparently no honor among thieves.

While the pledge appeared to support market principles by taking a stand against disruption of “fair competition with abnormal pricing,” there is nothing abnormal about price wars in market systems unless one seller attempts to undercut another so much as to sell beneath the price of production in what amounts to dumping of goods on the market.

Dumping is used by large businesses (and countries like China) to put relatively smaller competitors (and countries) out of business, creating monopoly conditions in the process. Monopoly capitalism, which is what Beijing apparently wants to bring back from the 19th century after reading all about the Rockefellers and Carnegies, is not conducive to the competition required in truly free modern markets.

That Beijing would step in to increase prices for Chinese consumers should make them demand answers to the obvious questions: Are Mr. Musk and the others engaged in price-fixing at the direction of the CCP and at the expense of Chinese citizens? Is that the “true socialism” that seeks the “greatest good for all” according to Mr. Musk?

Mr. Musk’s apparent hypocrisy may confuse some, until they remember that he is really a capitalist milking China for all its got, while he lets China milk him for the technology the CCP needs to drive its global market expansion in self-driving EVs, not to mention who knows what else (SpaceX rockets?).

Mr. Musk and Beijing are in a deal with the devil by which they both come out ahead, while Chinese and American consumers are left behind paying more for electric cars, and national security, than they really should. That should be no surprise, as Chinese citizens, at least, have as a whole allowed themselves since the 1920s to be overtaken by the CCP. American citizens, and the global public, are now taking the same risk.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.