This week, the world’s attention was on the chemistry between US president Donald Trump and China’s leader Xi Jinping at a high-stakes summit. But on Chinese social media, the bigger draw was an awkward encounter between two other men: Elon Musk and his rival, Lei Jun.
A brief, stilted interaction between Musk, who has long been a tech idol in China, and Lei, one of the country’s most prominent entrepreneurs, went viral as commentators spun a few seconds of footage into a personal drama between two business rivals.
Musk was in Beijing with a delegation of business leaders who had accompanied Trump on Air Force One. On Thursday, he joined US officials and Chinese leaders at a banquet at the Great Hall of the People, where he sat alone as a parade of executives took turns dropping into an empty seat beside him to pose for photos.
He was already grimacing and visibly huffing by the time Lei, the billionaire founder of Xiaomi, one of China’s largest electronics companies, approached him and gestured for a selfie.
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Musk pulled a few faces, flashed a look of indifference, then hammed it up for the camera before turning to his phone and pretending to be busy.
The clip, only a few seconds long, went viral almost immediately. Musk even reposted it on X, the social media platform he owns, which is banned in China, where the government tightly controls the media.
Some viewers chastised Lei for pestering Musk. Others claimed he had “lost face” by looking obsequious, while some came to his defence. On Friday afternoon, the hashtag #leijunelonmuskselfie had 75 million views on Weibo, the Chinese social media platform.
“It’s just like a monkey climbing a tree,” wrote Liujishou, a social media influencer on Weibo who has 13 million followers, casting Lei’s request as an act of social climbing.
[ Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Pete Hegseth: who has travelled with Trump to China?Opens in new window ]
“No matter how high you climb, as soon as you look up, you see a butt.”
Musk is widely credited for spurring intense competition in China’s electric vehicle industry. His company, Tesla, manufactures half of its cars in China but local competitors are catching up fast. – This article originally appeared in The New York Times
