Elon Musk Calls US-China Trade 'Conjoined Twins' in Rare People's Daily Interview
In an exclusive video conversation with the party's flagship paper, Musk warned that forcibly separating the two economies would be 'extremely dangerous,' and said AI development must take safety seriously.
People's Daily's new-media arm has published an exclusive video interview with Elon Musk — a conversation the party's flagship paper framed around China-US relations, artificial intelligence and "the future of humanity," posted in full with the paper's own promotional push as the National Day holiday began.
The line already traveling through Chinese social media is his answer on trade. Musk likened the two economies to "a pair of conjoined twins, sharing almost one body — forcing them apart would be extremely dangerous," a clip the paper's account promoted separately. It is a blunter image than Washington's current vocabulary allows, and it ran in the paper of record for the Chinese Communist Party without hedging.
On artificial intelligence, Musk said development needs to take safety seriously and urged an objective view of both countries' technical progress, according to a summary post circulating with the interview. The timing gave that answer an extra edge: it reached Chinese audiences days after Washington ordered US government agencies to rename AI "super intelligence", a reminder that the two governments are now marketing their approaches to the same technology in different languages.
Access of this kind is itself the story. People's Daily speaks for the party, and its marquee new-media interview slots rarely go to American entrepreneurs; granting one to Musk — the Tesla and SpaceX chief who has more manufacturing on the Chinese mainland than any other Western automaker — lands amid active trade friction between the two governments. The interview also touched lighter ground: Musk described a visit to Xi'an's Terracotta Warriors, impressions that carried their own hashtag and drew curious comparisons with his earlier trips to China.
What the paper published is a packaged, subtitled video rather than a transcript, so the full range of his answers is still being unpacked in the commentary beneath it. But the conjoined-twins metaphor is the part built to outlast the holiday: a formulation from the world's most prominent businessman that says separation between the two economies is not a policy option but a surgical risk — published, pointedly, on Beijing's terms and Beijing's timing.