Episode
Why Did Trump Take Elon Musk to China?
- Podcast
- Paul Krugman Podcast
- Published
- May 14, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 437
- Processing state
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Summary
Transcript What’s good for Elon Musk is not necessarily good for America. In fact, it may go the other way around. So why did Donald Trump take Musk and a bunch of other top executives to China with him? Hi, Paul Krugman, again from a cafe, a little noisy behind me, but I hope it’ll be tolerable. So Donald Trump has gone to Beijing. I wrote something about it earlier today, about the economics and about the generally pathetic state of the United States in geopolitics right now. But I want to focus for this video on the remarkable decision of Trump to bring a bunch of wealthy executives, in the case of some of them, like Musk, extremely wealthy executives, with him on a trip that is supposed to be something about serving the interests of the United States. America’s corporations are not America. They really have very distinctive differences in interest from those of the general public. You may have heard the old line that what’s good for General Motors is good for America. That’s not exactly what the CEO of General Motors said. What he said is that what’s good for America is good for General Motors and vice versa. But in any case he said that a very very long time ago, when corporations’ role in American life was not what it is now. General Motors at the time was a “stakeholder” corporation. That is, it did not see itself as solely serving the interests of stockholders. It viewed itself as having multiple groups that had a stake in the company. There was the workers who were represented by a powerful union. There were customers who were considered to be part of the story. They played a role in the wider community. Today corporations ruthlessly maximize value for stockholders, unless they do it for the founder who is considered to be the owner. (It’s not entirely clear t…