James Crabtree
An illustration shows Indian currency with Narendra Modi at center and billionaires Mukesh Ambani (left) and Gautam Adani (right).
In April 2024, Elon Musk was scheduled to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India and announce a multibillion-dollar Tesla factory investment. Instead, he canceled at the last minute and flew to China. Musk’s switch earned him a barrage of aggrieved Indian headlines. But even before his emergence as a force in Donald Trump’s second administration, the incident also served to underline Musk’s unusual role as a prized ambassador to the emerging industrial giants of Asia.
Musk embodies much of what India wants from its ties with the United States: the prospect of major investment, valuable technology transfer, and now a direct back channel to the White House. But viewed in a different way, India, with its system of close connections between billionaire industrialists and political power brokers, offers a means to understand an emerging U.S. economic model, in which tycoons such as Musk act as handmaidens of industrial policy but also conduits of political power.
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