THE GREAT WALL

Trump to Bring Billionaire Buffer to Face Xi

Trump has assembled a protective entourage of billionaire CEOs and corporate heavyweights.

President Donald Trump is bringing his billionaire CEO posse with him to China this week, including friend-turned-foe-turned-friend again, Elon Musk.

Musk, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and leaders of companies including Boeing, Goldman Sachs, and Mastercard have all signed up to accompany Trump.

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg is staying home, but he’s sending his company’s president, Dina Powell McCormick, in his stead.

The business leaders are tagging along, U.S officials said, because Trump wants to discuss the creation of a board of investment and a board of trade with China.

Musk, whose work in the early days of the second Trump presidency has caused ongoing headaches for the administration, appears to be back in the president’s good graces after a long time in the cold.

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After leaving the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) in a huff in May 2025, Musk railed against Trump and vowed to spen big to help defeat Republicans at the midterms.

He also encouraged the release of the Epstein files before his own connections were uncovered.

But after a conciliatory dinner in January, Trump told reporters: “I say about Elon, he’s 80 percent super genius and 20 percent he makes mistakes. But he’s a good guy.”

Not good enough for the president’s new Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, the make-up of which was announced in March, and excluded Musk but included Zuckerberg, Google’s Sergey Brin, NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang, AMD’s Lisa Su, and Oracle’s Larry Ellison.

Still, Musk has a seat on the plane to China, where Trump and China’s president Xi Jinping will hold two bilateral meetings and attend a state dinner during the three-day trip.

With many China-watchers saying Xi is holding all the cards for this coming summit, Trump’s CEO cabal looks to be an attempt to even the playing field.

Since re-taking the oval office, Trump has waged a largely ineffectual trade war with China, imposing huge tariffs on the global power in an attempt to reassert American manufacturing dominance.

In April 2025, Trump added an additional 145 percent tariff on Chinese-made goods entering the United States, on top of the 20 percent that Trump had already imposed.

The Chinese government retaliated with a 125 percent tariff of their own, signaling two could play that game. Since then, the trade war has continued, with China simply seeking new markets.

In October, Trump threatened and then quickly walked back a 100 percent increase in his existing tariffs, frustrated they weren’t having his desired effect.

China has reacted to Trump’s unpredictable tariff moves by diversifying their strategy, restricting rare earth exports and blocking US companies from acquiring Chinese assets. Most recently China stepped in to unwind Meta’s purchase of a Singaporean-based AI company.

The full list of business leaders joining Trump on the trip is: Tim Cook of Apple, Larry Fink of BlackRock, Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone, Kelly Ortberg of Boeing, Brian Sikes of Cargill, Jane Fraser of Citi, Jim Anderson of Coherent, Larry Culp of GE Aerospace, David Solomon of Goldman Sachs, Jacob Thaysen of Illumina, Michael Miebach of Mastercard, Dina Powell McCormick of Meta, Sanjay Mehrotra of Micron, Cristiano Amon of Qualcomm, Elon Musk of Tesla and Ryan McInerney of Visa.

This is the first visit by a U.S. president to China since 2017, and Trump’s second.

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Sarah-Jane CollinsReporter

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