Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, is currently in China, where he is traveling for the first time in more than three years.
He arrived in Beijing on Tuesday, and plans to travel to Shanghai to see Tesla's sizable factory there as well.
After only a few hours in China, the multibillionaire had already met Qin Gang, the foreign minister.
Despite tensions between the US and China, Mr. Musk has not yet made any public remarks about the trip.
When questioned by reporters as he was leaving a hotel in Beijing on Wednesday, he declined to comment on his travel arrangements.
Later that day, Mr. Musk met with China's Minister of Industry, Jin Zhuanglong, to discuss the advancement of electric vehicles.
The country is Tesla's second-largest market after the US, and the foreign ministry of China said in a statement on Tuesday that Mr. Musk was ready to grow the automaker's operations there.
The ministry also stated that during the meeting Mr. Musk referred to the US and Chinese economies as "conjoined twins.".
A BBC request for comment was not immediately answered by Tesla.
Additionally, Mr. Musk has been unusually quiet on Twitter, which he owns and has more than 141 million followers.
He has a reputation for tweeting frequently, but as of Wednesday noon, he had not done so since arriving in the nation on Tuesday afternoon.
Virtual private networks, or VPNs, allow access to the social media platform even though it is prohibited in China.
Mr. Musk is the most prominent US executive to visit China recently. Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, visited China in March, and Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JP Morgan, is there this week as well.
Tesla is now in a precarious position, according to Dan Ives of the investment firm Wedbush Securities, as tensions between Washington and Beijing increase.
To ensure that there are no delays in Tesla's expansion within China for the ensuing years, Mr. Ives continued, "Playing nice in the sandbox in Beijing is something Wall Street is laser focused on.
As the company's first manufacturing facility outside of the US, Tesla began construction on its so-called gigafactory in Shanghai in January 2019.
The American company achieved a significant milestone later that year when it delivered its first vehicles made in China.
However, Covid lockdowns across the nation, including in Shanghai, a center of commerce, manufacturing, and shipping, made it more challenging for manufacturers to operate.
Tesla reportedly stopped most of its production at its gigafactory for several weeks during the coronavirus lockdown of Shanghai last year, according to Mr. Musk.
The factory, which produced its one millionth car in August, has since resumed operations, according to Mr. Musk. A third of Tesla's total production was made up of these.
To produce its massive "Megapack" batteries, the company announced last month that it intended to construct a new factory in China.
According to market research firm JATO, China has also surpassed all other countries as the Model Y electric vehicle's primary market.
In the first three months of this year, more than 94,000 Model Y vehicles were sold in China, surpassing sales in the US and Europe, according to JATO data.
Tesla's dominance of the electric vehicle market has recently been threatened by increased competition from industry heavyweights like Ford and General Motors as well as more recent market entrants like China's BYD and Nio.
It has been demanded of Mr. Musk, who paid $44 billion (£35 point 5 billion) to acquire Twitter last year, to find a new CEO and turn his attention back to his other ventures, including Tesla and the rocket company SpaceX.
He appointed Linda Yaccarino, the former director of advertising at NBCUniversal, as the platform's new CEO earlier this month.
Ms. Yaccarino will have to deal with the challenge of managing a company that has had trouble turning a profit while coming under close scrutiny for how it addresses false information and hate speech.
According to financial services company Fidelity Investments, which assisted Mr. Musk in financing his acquisition of Twitter, the company is now only worth about a third of what Mr. Musk paid for it.
