“The World Has Never Seen Human Energy and Vigor at Such Scale” – Elon Musk in China

Tesla and SpaceX founder and all-round “big ideas” man Elon Musk has just wrapped up a three-day visit to China where he met with officials in Beijing and confirmed a deal for Tesla’s first foreign factory in Shanghai (albeit without saying how much it’ll all cost).

Chinese social media featured many a Musk-sighting as he toured around dropping hyperbole, making nice with his hosts and eating a greasy jianbing pancake.

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Never one for understatement, here was his take on the trip:

With my team after a profoundly interesting discussion of history, philosophy & luck with Vice President Wang in 中南海紫光阁 pic.twitter.com/pHd52YTZD2

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 12, 2018

Sounds great Elon! Just going to leave this here:

Whenever anyone claims to have had a 'fascinating conversation' with a Chinese leader, it inevitably means that the leader trotted out some of the most banal cliches about Chinese culture imaginable and the recipient treated it like they were sitting at the feet of Confucius.

— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) July 12, 2018

Of course, Mr Musk is far from the first American tech entrepreneur to jet into China for 72 hours and pen a love letter to the country. Really far.

Take Y Combinator President Sam Altman talking about how he’s “more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco”, or Sequoia Capital Chairman Mike Moritz arguing (paywall) that “Silicon Valley would be wise to follow China’s lead” after a short stopover in the country.

Maybe we should be grateful Musk’s China musings have only been in tweet form thus far.

All of which is very nice, but we know what you’re thinking: “show us the jianbing photo”. Well alright:

Note he put his tie on for jianbing eating, not for Chinese official meeting

Inevitably, the race is already on on Weibo to track down which jianbing stall he went to. Expect them to be serving up “Teslabing” by the weekend.

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