The plane lands here

Kuka: At 8 p.m., Reuters news agency reported that a plane linked to Tesla owner Elon Musk had landed at Beijing airport, according to Chinese flight tracking services.

Elon Musk's private plane will land in Beijing on Sunday morning. Here, Tesla CEO Musk will make a surprise visit to the second largest electric car market, according to Reuters sources.

The United States is Tesla's largest market.

The plane stopped in Alaska, likely to refuel.

The purpose of the visit to China is that Musk wants to meet with senior Chinese officials to discuss the rollout of a fully self-driving car (Full-Self-Driving – FSD) program in China.

We collect data

One source told Reuters that the Tesla owner would also want approval to transfer data collected in China abroad, in order to train algorithms for self-driving cars.

A private plane matching Reuters' information landed Sunday morning after 8 a.m. in Beijing, according to a Dagbladet review of aviation monitoring service Flight Radar.

Since 2021, Tesla has stored all collected data in Shanghai, but has not transferred this data to the United States.

Tesla's self-driving (FSD) technology was introduced four years ago in China, but has not yet been made available.

Tesla is the biggest AI project on Earth, Elon Musk tweeted early Sunday.

Tough competition

The X account that used publicly available traffic data to track Elon Musk's private plane, then posted it, has previously been shut down. In December 2022, the @elonjet account, which had more than 526,000 followers, was banned.

This contradicts Musk's previous statements. In November 2022, Musk himself posted:

Musk said in a tweet on Twitter: “My commitment to freedom of expression even extends to not blocking the account that monitors my plane, even though that poses a direct security risk.”

Earlier this month, Musk announced on his social media platform X (formerly Twitter) that self-driving cars would be available to customers in China “very soon.”

Just over a week ago, Musk canceled a planned visit to India, where he was supposed to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The reason behind canceling the visit was “heavy commitments at Tesla.”

The company announced this month that it would have to lay off ten percent of its workforce due to weak sales and an intensifying price war from its Chinese competitors.

Last week, Musk said that Tesla would introduce a new, cheaper version of Tesla, and that it would introduce a “robot taxi” equipped with self-driving technology on August 8.