Elon Musk expressed grave concern about Taiwan’s dominance in the chip market — and the possibility of a Chinese invasion — in a tech CEO meeting at the White House last year, according to a book published on Tuesday about President Donald Trump’s second term.
The book, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” by The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, reported that the SpaceX owner had met with Trump and the CEOs of firms such as Dell, Qualcomm, and Intel on March 10, 2025.
Haberman and Swan wrote that Musk told the gathering in the Roosevelt Room that he was “shitting bricks about our vulnerability to China.”
But Musk had grown increasingly alarmed in recent years, especially over the threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, which would jeopardize the supply of high-end chips that Musk’s companies depended on. And now, with these CEOs as his audience, Musk was frantically sounding the alarm about the fact that an island country roughly the size of Maryland, floating eighty-one miles off mainland China, produced around 70 percent of all the semiconductors on earth and 90 percent of the most advanced chips. He was lecturing a gathering more familiar with this problem than perhaps any other group of people in the world. But Musk kept banging away.
“If we don’t start building chips outside the zone of confrontation,” he said, “we are headed for disaster.” He reiterated the point: “Somebody’s got to build the damn fabs [fabrication plants] outside the battle zone!”
According to the book, Trump said China’s leader, Xi Jinping, had given assurances that Beijing would not launch an invasion of Taiwan while the former sat in the White House.
But Haberman and Swan reported that Trump added a caveat: “Could be lying. Taiwan is the apple of Xi’s eye, just like Ukraine was for Putin.”
The group of CEOs, alongside Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, then discussed how the US might claw back some of the world’s semiconductor supply chain and shift factories from Asia to American soil.
“The United States will only have thirty percent of TSMC’s capacity in 2029. If China invades Taiwan, the entire economy crashes,” Musk said, per the book.
In May, Musk and other American tech CEOs, including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Apple’s Tim Cook, accompanied Trump on an official visit to China.
Musk was widely regarded as a figure who could help stabilize Beijing and Washington’s economic ties.
Tesla operates a major factory, Gigafactory 3, in Shanghai that employs roughly 20,000 workers. The American automaker enjoys the rare arrangement of wholly owning the factory without needing a joint venture with a Chinese firm.
The White House and Musk did not immediately respond to requests for comment sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.
“Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump” is available for purchase on Amazon.