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.
