Bloomberg New Economy: How Elon Musk Won Trump’s China Trade War

The bargain that China’s top leaders struck with Elon Musk perfectly illustrates why the Trump administration’s multi-pronged pushback on Beijing in the areas of trade, technology and security has largely failed. And it also shows why the team coming in behind U.S. President-elect Joe Biden will have to come up with a radically different approach to compete with America’s most powerful rival.

To induce the billionaire chief executive of Tesla and Space X to build Giga Shanghai in the middle of Trump’s trade war, they showered him with perks and special favors (like tax breaks and cheap loans) and granted his organization extraordinary access to power. Apparently, Tesla’s local unit has a channel to President Xi Jinping himself, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. What did Musk get out of the deal? Privileged access to the world’s largest electric vehicle market by far—and wealth untold.