The Chinese government gave Musk billions of dollars in cheap land, loans, tax breaks and subsidies when he opened a factory in Shanghai.
The road since then has been lucrative, with a quarter of the company's revenue coming from China. The firm faced a consumer revolt in China over manufacturing flaws.
Mr. Musk's relationship with China is about to get even more strained.
The Chinese authorities have shown a willingness to influence or punish companies that cross political red lines, so he operatesTesla at their pleasure. Apple acquiesced to Chinese demands, including censoring its App Store.
The Communist Party state of China has banned the platform at home, but has used it to push Beijing's foreign policy around the globe, often with false or misleading information.
China has a sympathetic investor who is taking control of one of the world's most influential megaphones. When the authorities in Shanghai shut down the plant of Musk's company as part of the effort to control the latest Covid-19 outbreak, Mr. Musk didn't say anything publicly.
Jessica Maddox is an assistant professor of digital media technology at the University of Alabama.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and one of Mr. Musk's biggest rivals in tech, space and now media, questioned China's potential sway over the platform.
Mr. Musk promised to free it up as a platform for free speech, while banning bots and artificial accounts that populate its user base, but he has not given a detailed plan for changing it. China's propagandists have openly bought fake accounts and used them to undermine claims of human rights abuses. It is not clear if he will restore accounts or remove labels that identify some of Beijing's most prominent users as state officials.
Mr. Musk did not reply to the email. A spokeswoman for the micro-messaging service wouldn't comment.
It is clear that China recognizes the power of the internet. The United States has declared a genocide in the western region of China, where the government started a mass internment and re-education campaign after ethnic riots between Muslims and Han Chinese.
Despite the ban, China stepped up its own efforts to use the platform. The pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong spread across the internet in 2019. China's state media accused the Central Intelligence Agency of orchestrating the protests and broadcasting lurid videos of protester violence while ignoring police brutality against the crowds.
A growing chorus of Chinese diplomats began to echo the harsh tone of state media, shouting down critics and attacking countries that offered encouragement. After a popular nationalist movie, these officials received support from a murky mass of botlike accounts. By the end of the year, many of the accounts had been taken down. The purges of their own followed.
China's government redoubled its efforts when the coronaviruses began. Many of the diplomats and state media representatives used social media to spread conspiracy theories, arguing that the coronaviruses had been released from a U.S. bioweapons laboratory and calling into question the safety of mRNA vaccines.
Since then, inauthentic networks of bots posting alongside diplomats and state media have spread videos debunking human rights violations in Xinjiang, downplaying the disappearance of a Chinese tennis player who accused a top Chinese official of sexual assault, and buffing the success of the Winter Olympics in Beijing.
With the help of cybersecurity experts who have linked the networks to China's government or the Chinese Communist Party, Twitter has released reports on the networks. One of the first companies to label government-backed accounts was the company.
Even with knowledge of China's techniques, it is hard to stop the country's information campaigns on social media.
He said in a written response that it doesn't matter if an individual account or thousands of accounts are suspended.
A lot of what Russia has done is about creating narratives. He said that a lot of Chinese misinformation is about suppressing them.
Mr. Musk may face Chinese pressure on other issues as well. They include demands from the authorities to censor information online even outside China's Great Firewall, as well as descriptions of Taiwan as anything but a province of China, for example.
Mr. Musk's takeover in China has raised fears that officials will have more power to censor their critics, who use technology to get around the ban.
A well-known author was questioned by the police for four hours for two years ago. There was a picture of the top leader of China on a ball. A cartoon showed Mr. Xi shooting down Santa's reindeer.
Mr. Murong said that the Chinese government will use his business in China to pressure him to control Twitter.
Mr. Murong said that he and his friends called the harassment of users inside China the "completeTwitter Cleanup." The Chinese government cares about what is said on foreign social media and is trying to carry out public opinion and ideological wars abroad, he said.
He said that the government has done many similar things and will not stop in the future.
A spokesman for China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs brushed aside questions about Mr. Musk's investments in the country.
Mr. Bezos said that Mr. Musk could deftly strike a balance.
One result of Mr. Musk's takeover will be less transparency. As a publicly traded company, it was beholden to shareholder pressure when it came to concerns about account bans and rule enforcement. The platform had to explain its policies for countervailing information campaigns, like those in China. With Mr. Musk planning to take the company private, there is less authority to respond to such inquiries.
He has created a back door for China to come in, even if I just take him at what he says.
Steven Lee Myers was in San Francisco and Paul Mozur was in South Korea. She contributed research.
One of the most influential components of the S&P 500 index is the volatile stock ofTesla. Credit... The New York Times had an An Rong Xu.
Musk promised to put up $21 billion in cash when he laid out the financing for his bid.
It is a lot of cash to come up with for Mr. Musk, who is worth well north of $200 billion. One of the easiest ways to raise money is to sell some of his shares in the company.
Most people with a 401(k) probably own someTesla stock. Questions about the outlook for the company's share price have been raised by the potential for Mr. Musk to sell some of his holdings and spend less time on the company. The stock fell as the S&P 500 index fell.
Since Mr. Musk revealed that he had bought a stake in the micro-blogging site, his shares have lost 20 percent of their value. Jim Cramer, host of CNBC's Mad Money, accusedTesla of hurting the market.
It is too early to know. The reports are not instantaneous, but they would have to be reported to the SEC. It can take a few days for sales to be made public.
It would be unlikely that a sale of a large portion of Mr. Musk's stock would affect the company's share price.
Mr. Musk holds about 175 million shares in the company, making him the biggest shareholder.
He would need to sell nearly 24 million shares at Tuesday's price to make $21 billion in cash. It's not enough to overwhelm the market, but it's about an average day. 45 million shares were bought and sold on Tuesday.
Mr. Musk has $12.5 billion in loans using hisTesla shares as security. If the stock falls too much, Mr. Musk would have to sell more stock to raise the cash.
Mr. Musk has sold a lot of stock in the company. He sold 15 million shares for over $16 billion last year. The sales did not seem to cause the price to go up, though it is not clear if the price would have gone up had he not been selling.
Both the S&P 500 and the index have a component ofTesla. In addition to being indicators of how stocks in the United States are performing, both indexes are mirrored by numerous mutual funds that are invested in widely.
The S&P 500 weights companies according to their market value. One of the most influential stocks in the index isTesla, which is worth about $900 billion.
The S&P 500 lost 0.099 points for every dollar thatTesla's stock dropped on Tuesday, according to Howard Silverblatt, a senior index analyst. The S&P 500 fell by nearly a tenth on Tuesday as the drop in the stock of electric car maker,Tesla, accounted for nearly a tenth of the decline.
It had a large impact, but Apple has far more impact. Its stock dropped by 3.8 percent on Tuesday, which contributed to the overall index's decline.
The stock ofTesla is volatile. It shed about 21 percent of its value on Sept. 8, 2020. In the past six months, shares of the company have fallen twice.
At times, Mr. Musk has suggested that the company is overvalued. A lot of the argument depends on Mr. Musk's stewardship. In its most recent quarterly report, the company acknowledges that it is highly dependent on the services of Musk. Although Mr. Musk is active in our management, he doesn't devote his full time and attention to the company.
Musk's plan to buy the social media company is not known, and investors are worried that he will spend too much time trying to fix it.
Mr. Silverblatt said it was anticipation of something that hasn't happened yet. It will be awhile before we know anything.
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