Donald Trump’s ‘CEO crew’ to Beijing is almost as rich as the world’s third-largest economy

Nvidia and Apple alone outweigh three G7 economies

The rest of the manifest tilts heavily towards Wall Street, semis, and aerospace. Elon Musk brings Tesla ($1.68 trillion), the only car company on the plane and one with a significant Shanghai gigafactory to protect. Meta is on the list too ($1.59 trillion), though it sent its president of global affairs Dina Powell McCormick rather than Mark Zuckerberg. Boeing’s Kelly Ortberg is along with a large aircraft order reportedly on the agenda. BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon, Citi’s Jane Fraser, and Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman form the finance bloc. Micron ($847 billion) and Qualcomm flank Nvidia on chips. Visa, Mastercard, GE Aerospace, Illumina, Coherent, and Cargill round it out.The trip is also one of Cook’s last big diplomatic moves at Apple. He announced last month that he’ll hand the CEO job to hardware chief John Ternus on September 1. Cook spent both Trump terms negotiating exemptions and shifting iPhone production—first to India for the US market, then promising $600 billion in American investment—to keep Apple out of the worst of the tariff crossfire. Beijing has been watching that pivot closely.

A note on the math: Market capitalization and GDP are not directly comparable, as they measure fundamentally different aspects of economic activity. On a purchasing power parity (PPP) basis, China’s economy is estimated at approximately $43.8 trillion. The comparison is intended solely to illustrate the scale of the world’s most valuable companies relative to the size of China’s economy.

AI chips, blocked deals, and a delegation with a lot to ask for

From Nvidia and Apple to Tesla, Qualcomm, and Boeing, some of the world’s most valuable companies are heading to Beijing with one goal: secure greater access to the world’s second-largest economy. (Disclaimer: The image is generated using AI.)

Trump’s own framing of the trip, in a post after takeoff, was that he would ask Xi to “open up” China so his “brilliant people” could “work their magic.” He name-checked Jensen, Elon, “Tim Apple,” Larry Fink, Stephen Schwarzman, Kelly Ortberg, Brian Sikes, Jane Fraser, Larry Culp, David Solomon, Sanjay Mehrotra, and Cristiano Amon, and promised it would be his first request of Xi when they sat down. The pitch is essentially: I’ve brought you my best people, now let them sell.The catch is that for most of the tech names on the plane, the door has already been pried open and Beijing is the one keeping it half-shut. Huang’s whole reason for being there is the H200. He has pegged China as a $50 billion opportunity for Nvidia, and has spent the better part of a year lobbying officials on both sides. The Trump administration cleared export licences months ago, with conditions—a third-party review of each shipment, a 50% cap relative to US customer sales, and a ban on military use. In March, Huang said Nvidia had permission to ship to “many customers” in China and was firing up production. Then Beijing didn’t move. Chinese firms that placed orders quietly told Nvidia they couldn’t fulfil them, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in April that no H200s had actually shipped, because the Chinese government was steering money towards Huawei instead. Beijing also rejected the less advanced H20s outright last year. Nvidia’s most powerful chips—Blackwell and the upcoming Rubin—weren’t part of the approved list at all. “Open up” is exactly what Huang needs Xi to do.Meta is on the plane with the opposite problem—Trump didn’t name-check it in the post, and the company didn’t send its CEO. In late April, China blocked Meta’s $2 billion acquisition of Manus, the Singapore-registered AI startup with Chinese founding roots. Beijing’s state planner ordered the deal unwound, and the decision was reportedly escalated to the National Security Commission chaired by Xi himself. The state-run Global Times argued that Manus’s R&D, data, and engineering talent all originated in China, and that re-registering offshore didn’t change the underlying ownership of the technology. Meta had already integrated Manus into its internal systems and onboarded the startup’s executives. Unwinding any of that will be messy.Mehrotra and Amon, the two chip CEOs Trump did name, both have specific damage to repair. Qualcomm’s stock dropped 11% on Tuesday, the day Trump’s plane took off, as chip stocks pulled back from a record AI-driven rally. The company derives a sizeable chunk of its revenue from Chinese smartphone makers, and its modem business has been a recurring pressure point in US-China tech talks. Micron is in a similar bind—Beijing banned its memory chips from critical infrastructure projects back in 2023, and the company has spent the years since trying to claw back its position in a market it once depended on.The smaller tech names rounding out Trump’s “and many others” have their own reasons for showing up. Coherent, up 292% over the past year on AI data centre demand, makes the optical networking gear that ties Nvidia clusters together—and a lot of that gear is assembled or sourced through Chinese supply chains. Illumina spent two years on a Chinese sanctions list over its 2021 Grail acquisition and was only removed earlier this year, so the trip is a chance to reset relations with regulators it has been fighting in court.