Amazon founder Jeff Bezos questioned whether Twitter will fall under the influence of the Chinese regime, hours after Tesla CEO Elon Musk secured a $44 billion buyout of the social media firm.
“Interesting question. Did the Chinese government just gain a bit of leverage over the town square?” Bezos wrote on Twitter, responding to a post by a New York Times reporter who outlined the ties between Tesla and Beijing.
“Tesla’s second-biggest market in 2021 was China (after the US) [and] Chinese battery makers are major suppliers for Tesla’s EVs,” the post said. “After 2009, when China banned Twitter, the government there had almost no leverage over the platform.”
“That may have just changed,” the post concluded.
Bezos’s “town square” is an apparent reference to Musk’s Twitter post after securing the deal. The Tesla chief wrote, “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.”
Less than two hours after his initial post, Bezos decided to back away from his own question.
“My own answer to this question is probably not. The more likely outcome in this regard is complexity in China for Tesla, rather than censorship at Twitter,” Bezos wrote on Twitter. “But we’ll see. Musk is extremely good at navigating this kind of complexity.”
Bezos’s response to his own question caught the attention of Charles Mok, a former pro-democracy lawmaker in Hong Kong and a current visiting scholar at Harvard University.
“You may be right. Maybe China did not gain more of a leverage,” Mok wrote on Twitter. “Twitter is not high enough on China’s list. They already have a lot of that from Mr Musk. What he wouldn’t do or say about China, already.”
Tesla has enjoyed enormous success in China, with its wholly-owned factory in Shanghai producing about half of its cars sold around the world in 2021. Its success in the Chinese market has been driven in part by cheap loans the company secured from China’s state-run banks and tax breaks the electric carmaker obtained from Beijing.
By Frank Fang
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