Elon Musk: Chinese are “smart, hard working” while US has “much more complacency and entitlement”

China had helped Elon Musk last year to get around $1.5 billion in loans for Tesla's Shanghai factory. The local government had also supported the company to return to normalcy in operations after manufacturing was temporarily shut due to Covid pandemic.

Amid trade tensions between the US and China even as the latter has been facing flak from many other countries following the Coronavirus outbreak, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has praised the “smart” and “hard-working people” of Asia’s leading economy. “China rocks in my opinion. The energy in China is great. People there – there’s like a lot of smart, hard-working people. And they’re really — they’re not entitled, they’re not complacent,” Musk told Automotive News. The comment was in response to the question about China’s electric vehicle strategy. In contrast to Chinese, Musk said that there is ‘’increasingly much more complacency and entitlement especially in places like the Bay Area, and LA, and New York.”

Musk further pointed out that while the Chinese government has been supportive to an extent but in the US, “Tesla has had the least government support of any car company.” China had helped Musk last year to get around $1.5 billion in loans for Tesla’s Shanghai factory. The local government also supported Tesla to return to normalcy in operations after manufacturing was temporarily shut due to Covid pandemic. “They have been supportive. But it would be weird if they were more supportive to a non-Chinese company. They’re not,” he said.

The billionaire entrepreneur pointing towards the future of selling cars claimed that delivering cars directly to consumers and the online sales will increasingly become the new normal instead of sales through dealerships or stores. “Having a traditional dealer situation, I think, seems increasingly unnecessary and I think probably the pandemic just reinforced that,” he added.

Stressing on the inherent importance of product quality to make customers and investors happy, Musk advised companies across the world to “spend less time on marketing presentations and more time on your product. Honestly, that should be the number one thing taught in business schools.”