Inside Maye Musk’s Cozy Relationship With China
In January, with a nationwide ban on TikTok looming, hundreds of thousands of people in the US began flocking to another Chinese social media app called RedNote—only to find that Maye Musk, Elon Musk’s mother, had already established a relatively large audience on the platform. Maye, who has become a celebrity in her own right in China over the past few years, had over 600,000 followers on RedNote when the flood of Americans arrived.
“I need to find the block button,” one American user commented under Maye’s latest video at the time, which has received over 10,000 likes. “I can’t believe I’m witnessing American people confronting Musk’s mom to her face,” another comment in Chinese reads. Shortly afterward, Maye’s comment section on RedNote was closed for several weeks. New comments didn’t start showing up again until early February.
The incident represented a rare moment when the parallel public images Maye Musk has created for herself collided. In China, the 76 year-old has built a largely apolitical reputation as a “silver influencer,” fashion model for local brands, and book author who regularly garners positive coverage in Chinese state media, The New York Times previously reported. Last week, she made another trip to China, this time to the city of Wuxi, where she was invited to watch a drone show, promoted traditional crafts, and posed with a special Tesla model that comes in different colorways sold only in Asia.
But in the US, Maye’s career has increasingly converged with Elon’s as her son gained unprecedented power and influence over the US federal government. Since President Trump won reelection, Maye has traveled on Air Force One, sat next to Melania Trump at a Mar-a-Lago dinner party, and attended a luncheon with Ivanka Trump, while also regularly firing off posts on X about US politics, according to a WIRED review of her social media presence.
In many ways, Maye appears to be trying to straddle the fine line between her political engagement in the US and her business dealings in China and other foreign countries. That endeavor has become more fraught over the past two months as Trump began radically reshaping US foreign policy, including imposing new tariffs on China. “There’s a heightened risk now for American business people traveling to China and that continues to increase, especially as tensions in the trade war will increase,” says Holden Triplett, cofounder of Trenchcoat Advisors and a former senior FBI official posted in Beijing.
Maye Musk’s business manager and Creative Artists Agency, her talent-representative agency in China, did not reply to requests for comment from WIRED.
Even before she began traveling regularly to China, Maye publicly supported Elon’s and Tesla’s business endeavors in the country. In 2015, she retweeted a post by Elon in which he mentioned meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. “Great trip to China seeing President Xi … Pic w China team in state garden,” the tweet reads, which was later deleted from Elon’s profile.
Maye’s retweet, however, was still accessible at the time of publication. It’s a piece of largely overlooked evidence documenting Elon’s long business history in China and his relationship with the country’s government, which has attracted scrutiny from lawmakers as he took over the social media platform X and began playing a central role in US politics. While many top American officials consider China a key foreign adversary, Musk has rarely criticized the country and relies on it as a major consumer market and manufacturing hub for Tesla.
Elon did not respond to a request for comment from WIRED about when or why he deleted the tweet as well as another seemingly from the same trip in which he said he was “very optimistic about Tesla’s long term future in China.” (Elon has deleted hundreds of tweets over the years spanning many topics, according to the PolitTweet archive.)
Maye began building her own public image in China in late 2016 when she visited the country for the first time and spoke at an event hosted by the Chinese tech giant Alibaba. The company was promoting its global ecommerce fashion offerings and invited Maye, who it dubbed a “fashion legend,” to appear on stage with Alibaba’s then-chief marketing officer Chris Tung. That same year, a biography of Elon Musk written by Ashlee Vance was translated into Chinese, and people in China were eager to learn more about the tech entrepreneur’s mother.
But her career really kicked off in 2020 when her own biography, A Woman Makes a Plan, was also translated into Chinese. Around the same time, she registered accounts on the Chinese social media platforms Douyin and Weibo and held a virtual book talk with Wendi Murdoch, the Chinese-born ex-wife of conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch. She also expressed interest in visiting China and Tesla’s factory in Shanghai, but noted the pandemic lockdowns were keeping her away.
Maye later modeled for Chinese brands looking to showcase their global appeal, including the Chinese smartphone giant OPPO and several fashion and beauty companies. In 2023, she went on a whirlwind book tour across China which included some events sponsored by a Chinese women’s underwear brand.
By early 2024, Maye was so in demand that she was going “to China nearly every month,” she said at a fashion show in February where she walked the runway for a Chinese designer. Her trips, in turn, were celebrated by China’s Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs as a way to encourage more foreigners to visit the country.
While she usually emphasizes her career as a dietitian and book author, Maye’s China trips have also served as publicity events for Tesla. On that same 2023 tour, Maye visited Tesla’s Gigafactory in Shanghai and was featured in a video posted by Tesla, where she praised the “quality and the enthusiasm” she saw at the facility. (Last month, Tesla expanded its presence in Shanghai by opening a $200 million battery manufacturing plant in the city.) But Maye’s casual retweets and public support for Tesla’s global business turned into something much more dramatic this year.
As her son was getting more involved in American politics and becoming Donald Trump’s largest donor, Maye’s social media presence in the West also experienced a 180-degree transformation. Her X timeline made almost no mention of either the word “Democrat” or “Republican” until September of last year, but now she’s regularly endorsing Republican politicians and bashing the US media. In 2016, she tweeted about attending a Hillary Clinton fundraiser with the hashtag #ImWithHer and a New Yorker story titled “The Dangerous Acceptance of Donald Trump” but now appears in glitzy pictures taken at Trump rallies and Mar-a-Lago events.
Her Chinese social media, which lists an email associated with Creative Artists Agency China as her business contact, doesn't show any of that. The focus remains brand advertisements, book promotions, and festive holiday videos in which she wishes happy Chinese New Year to her Chinese fans while wearing traditional Chinese clothes. She rarely brings up politics when she’s traveling in China either.
Maye flew to China several days after the US presidential election in November, where she was asked during a panel event what she thought of the results and her son’s involvement. “He is dedicated to making America a wonderful country and to give us hope. And now we have hope,” Maye said, before brushing off a question about whether Elon is expected to take a role in the government, saying only that he “really likes rockets and cars.”
For now, Maye appears to be maintaining her relationships in China. On January 16, she was invited by China’s state-owned broadcaster to an event in New York City to celebrate the Chinese New Year during which the deputy head of China’s top propaganda department gave a speech. Maye was also interviewed and wore a white dress with a Chinese festive design that she said was “made specially for her.”
Four days later, she would appear at Trump’s inauguration party in Washington, DC, with her daughter in a long red dress with a crystal-embroidered brooch in the shape of a chrysanthemum. She would spend several nights partying with people like Trump’s health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and artificial intelligence and crypto adviser David Sacks. Photos from these parties, just like those from the numerous American political events that she has been to since October, are nowhere to be found on her Chinese social media.
https://www.wired.com/story/maye-musk-china-influencer-brands/