Kokka ten past eight, the Reuters news agency reports that a plane linked to Tesla owner Elon Musk has landed at the airport in Bejing, according to Chinese flight tracking services.
Elon Musk’s private plane will have landed in Beijing on Sunday morning. Here, Tesla CEO Musk will make a surprise visit to the second largest market for the electric cars, according to Reuters sources.
The plane has stopped in Alaska, probably to refuel.
The purpose of the visit to China is that Musk wants to meet leading Chinese officials to discuss the rollout of software for fully self-driving cars (Full-Self-Driving – FSD) in China. The Tesla owner will also want to be approved to transfer data collected in China abroad, in order to train algorithms for the self-driving cars, one of the sources told Reuters.
ROUTE: This is supposed to be the route Elon Musk’s private jet took on his way to the surprise visit to China. Photo: Flightradar24 / Screenshot
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Since 2021, Tesla has stored all data collected in Shanghai, but they have not transferred this data to the United States.
Tesla’s technology for self-driving cars (FSD) was rolled out four years ago in China, but has so far not been made available.
A private plane that matches Reuters’ information landed on Sunday morning just after 08:00 in Beijing, according to Dagbladet’s review of the flight monitoring service Flightradar.
THE HOLD: Elon Musk, owner of both Tesla and X, formerly Twitter, has previously apparently expressed that he is not too happy with his travels being monitored. This photo is from Paris in June 2023. Photo: NTB / REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes //File Photo
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An X account that used publicly available traffic data to track Elon Musk’s private jet, and then post this, was previously shut down. In December 2022, the account @elonjet, which had more than 526,000, was blocked.
This goes against Musk’s previous statements. In November 2022, Musk himself posted:
“My commitment to free speech even extends to not banning the account that monitors my plane, even though it is a direct security risk,” Musk tweeted.
Earlier this month, Musk announced on his social media platform X (formerly Twitter) that self-driving cars will be available to customers in China “very soon.”
A little over a week ago, Musk canceled a planned visit to India, where he was supposed to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The reason given for the visit having to be canceled was “heavy commitments at Tesla”.
This month, the company announced that it will have to lay off ten percent of its workforce due to poor sales and an intensive price war from its Chinese competitors.
