Even by Elon Musk’s mercurial standards, this has been quite a week.
On Sunday, it seemed as though the maverick billionaire boss of Tesla, SpaceX and social media platform X had pulled off an unlikely coup when he made a surprise visit to Beijing to meet Li Qiang, the Chinese premier and number two in the country’s political hierarchy.
Hours later a Chinese industry group revealed that Tesla’s electric vehicles had been included on a list of more than 70 car models that have been tested for data security compliance. Then people close to Baidu, China’s Google, confirmed a tie-up with Tesla that would give Musk’s company access to the Chinese group’s navigation, mapping and data systems.