Elon Musk appears to be on the cusp of deploying Tesla’s “full self-driving” system in the world’s biggest car market.

Musk flew out of Beijing on Monday after meeting China’s premier, Li Qiang, on Sunday and sealing a deal with Chinese tech giant Baidu to use the group’s mapping and navigation systems. Hours earlier, a Chinese industry group said Tesla’s EVs were among more than 70 cars that had been successfully tested for data security compliance.

Taken together, Musk appears to have smoothed the path for the US company’s semi-autonomous driving technology to be rolled out in China. Tesla’s share price closed 15.3 per cent higher on Monday at $194.05 on reports of the Baidu deal but remains at half of its 2022 peak.

Here is what the billionaire’s trip to China means for Tesla and the government in Beijing.

How much is Chinese approval worth to Tesla?

As sales fall and competition grows fiercer, Tesla has increasingly talked up the commercial opportunities that its self-driving technology offers.

“Going balls to the wall on autonomy is a blindingly obvious move,” Musk wrote on X, his social media platform, this month.

Tom Narayan, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, said income from autonomous driving accounted for a fifth of his share price target for Tesla. The carmaker charges US drivers $99 a month to activate “full self-driving”, a partially autonomous system that ostensibly chauffeurs drivers but still requires motorists to pay attention.

Being allowed to offer the same service in China, where the company has about 1.6mn cars on the road, “would unlock a significant fleet of Tesla vehicles able to charge subscription fees”, said Narayan.

The move into China would also “push Tesla further to be an industry standard for software,” he added, and encourage other carmakers to license its technology.

Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush, said Musk’s trip resulted in the “long-awaited FSD approval”, which amounted to a “watershed moment” for the company. Tesla’s long-term valuation “hinges” on income from autonomy, he said, and China had been a “missing piece of the puzzle”.

“This is a key moment for Musk as well as Beijing at a time that Tesla has faced massive domestic EV competition in China along with softer demand,” he added.

Will new technology turn around slowing sales growth at Tesla? 

Tesla has put significant stock in the value of globalising its self-driving technology as its core EV line-up ages compared with newer products from its Chinese rivals.

While arch-rival BYD aims to launch cars within 18 months of conception, it has been four years since Tesla released the Model Y, its best-selling car. The company announced the Roadster sports car in 2017 but has yet to begin production.

Musk last week promised that a new lower-cost model was coming next year. But despite a “refreshed” Model 3 entering production this year, the company is still nurturing a product offering that is significantly older than that of its competitors.

“The Tesla range is looking quite old,” said one former Tesla executive. “The [battery] tech is fine, but there are others out there, especially the Chinese, who are arguably better. The question [if he deploys FSD], is how much longer does he have a technology advantage on that?”

Expansion in China will be a test of how Tesla’s self-driving technology stacks up against local rivals. “They are betting it is the tech that makes or breaks a purchase decision,” said the former executive. 

But it is not clear how confident consumers outside of urban areas are in the technology. “FSD works in Silicon Valley but not in Illinois,” added the former executive. “For the mass market it is still witchcraft.”

Why is helping Tesla important to China?

Under President Xi Jinping, many experts believe China has prioritised security over economic growth and domestic technology independence over integration with the outside world.

Angela Zhang, a professor of law at the University of Hong Kong and author of two books on Chinese technology regulation, said there were signs that Beijing was “easing” its approach as it needed foreign investment to shore up an economy in “deep trouble”.

Chinese EV producers want to dominate global markets and Beijing has a “strong incentive” to show the world that data security issues are not a barrier to international trade for Chinese EVs, she said.

Feng Chucheng, a partner at China-focused Hutong Research, said allowing Tesla’s self-driving technology had “strategic value” to Beijing.

The Cyberspace Administration of China has for several years been rolling out a sweeping legal framework for how businesses collect and use data, with strict rules on cross-border data flows and data viewed as a risk to Chinese security or citizens.

Despite western concerns about “over-securitisation”, the recent development of China’s data rules has been more “pro-growth”, Feng said. Beijing has been aligning its rules on outbound data transfer in line with the CPTPP and DEPA, two key regional trade pacts.

“Tesla’s rollout in China will be much desired for Beijing to prove that its data regulatory regime is gaining traction,” he said.

Can Tesla win back the Chinese market?

China is Tesla’s biggest market outside the US, a vital part of the supply chain for its electric vehicles and of growing importance as a regional export hub. Musk’s decision in 2018 to build a multibillion-dollar factory in Shanghai is credited with helping to spearhead the rapid growth of China’s EV industry.

But since then, the Chinese EV industry has stormed ahead. Tesla’s share of new electric vehicle sales stands at 7.5 per cent compared with 33 per cent for Warren Buffett-backed BYD. A core complaint from Chinese consumers has been the dearth of new Tesla models and high-tech features.

Despite the share price jump on Monday, analysts in China voiced caution.

Tom Nunlist, an expert in Chinese technology regulation with Beijing-based consultancy Trivium, said China’s regulatory environment was “still emerging”. “The folks that are overseeing the safety of automatic driving on highways are highly professional. They’re not going to relax their standards because of this [Musk’s visit],” he said.

Tu Le, founder of the Sino Auto Insights consultancy, said local rivals including Xpeng, Nio and Li Auto had their own self-driving systems and would drop their prices “the second” they thought consumers favoured Tesla’s technology. “Western analysts think Tesla automatically wins,” he said. “There are no guarantees.”

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A pro-Palestinian protester stands among tents and a Palestinian flag at an encampment at Columbia University campus in New York earlier this month.

LEONARDO MUNOZ/AFP via Getty Images

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A pro-Palestinian protester stands among tents and a Palestinian flag at an encampment at Columbia University campus in New York earlier this month.

LEONARDO MUNOZ/AFP via Getty Images

1. The 2024 protests have an “uncanny” resemblance to the 1968 student protests.

From coast to coast, dozens of universities are seeing pro-Palestinian protests and encampments on campuses across the U.S.:

• Boston police took down a pro-Palestinian encampment at Emerson College, clashing with protesters and taking more than 100 into custody.
• In just the past two weeks, at least 800 people have been arrested on college campuses, with some students facing suspension. Some universities are grappling with whether to proceed with upcoming graduation ceremonies.
• The University of Southern California put out a statement recently canceling its main graduation ceremony due to “safety measures.”

The last time the U.S. saw such fervor over protests on college campuses was some five decades ago.

Frank Guridy is a professor of history at Columbia University, where roughly a hundred students have been arrested.

Guridy teaches a class about the 1968 protests against the Vietnam war that took place on Columbia’s campus. He teaches in one of the buildings that students occupied in 1968 – Fayerweather Hall.

“As in 1968, the Columbia students of 2024 are absolutely galvanized by what’s transpiring in Gaza, in the Middle East,” Guridy said in an interview with NPR.

“In that sense, it is an uncanny resemblance to what transpired in the late sixties in this country, where U.S. students and other people in this country were inspired to speak out and mobilize against what they saw as an unjust war in Vietnam.”

2. Parallels and differences.

In Guridy’s class, students read historical texts that put the 1968 protests in a larger historical context. Students visit archives at Columbia and other parts of the city. At the end of the semester, they complete a research paper on what they’ve learned about the 1968 student protests.

“Students on this campus, a generation of students who have no direct connection to ’68. Yet what they see in it is as a source of inspiration,” Guridy said.

A key similarity between the protests of 1968 and 2024 are the calls for divestment. In the ’60s, students at college campuses tried to get their administrations to divest from the defense industry or anything connected to the war in Vietnam.

Guridy adds that the strategy of divestment has a long history that can even be traced back to the 1930s, when people were calling for the boycotting of Nazi Germany.

Today’s students are also targeting the financial choices made by their administrations.

Two of the main differences: the U.S. doesn’t have boots on the ground in Gaza, and American college students aren’t facing the draft.

“The draft was a real reality, including for privileged college students in the late 1960s. And so the sense of urgency was slightly different for the college students and the antiwar movement at that time,” says Guridy.

3. Lessons learned from 1968 protests.

Several student activists who spoke to NPR cited the organizing of students in 1968 as inspiration for their own movements.

Matthew Vickers, a junior at Occidental College in Los Angeles is one of the many students to set up encampments protesting Israel’s war in Gaza.

“Most of the Palestinian solidarity movement has taken direct tactical and moral inspiration from the movements of the sixties. I think the parallels cannot be more obvious,” said Vickers.

Alifa Chowdhury is a junior at the University of Michigan, and one of the protest organizers on her campus. Their encampment on the Diag is on the exact spot where students in the Sixties marched against the Vietnam War.

“So we’re building on things that have been done before, this is not a new phenomenon. We stand on that protest history today,” said Chowdhury.

This episode was produced by Noah Cadwell and Brianna Scott. It was edited by Courtney Dorning. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.

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Skydance and Shari Redstone’s holding company are offering a $3bn investment in Paramount in an effort to win support for a complex merger that has frustrated investors and led to the departure of the Hollywood group’s chief executive.

The offer, which includes $2bn in cash to common shareholders, came as Paramount chief executive Bob Bakish resigned on Monday, raising new questions about the future of the Hollywood group behind The Godfather. 

Redstone said on Monday: “The board and I thank Bob for his many contributions over his long career . . . we wish him all the best.”

Redstone and Paramount’s board, which she chairs, have been trying to agree a deal to merge the company with David Ellison’s Skydance, the production company backed by his billionaire father, Larry Ellison, as well as RedBird Capital and KKR. 

Under the latest terms of the deal, Skydance would buy Redstone’s National Amusements for less than $2bn, not as much as previously discussed between the two sides, said people briefed about the matter.

Those people added that Paramount would then merge with Skydance, valuing Ellison’s company at about $5bn in an all-stock deal. The combination would value the existing common shares of Paramount about 30 per cent above its current trading share price.

The Ellison-led consortium would also invest a further $3bn in the combined company, the people said. Two-thirds of the investment would pay cash to holders of common shares by buying back their stock, with the remainder used to reduce Paramount’s debt.

Shareholders would have the option to either sell their shares in Paramount or keep the stock of the combined company, or a combination of the two, as the buyback would be limited to a maximum amount of $2bn. Paramount’s Class B common shares have a current market capitalisation of about $7bn.

Paramount has a dual-class shareholding structure. Redstone’s NAI controls nearly 80 per cent of voting rights, but holds only 10 per cent of equity ownership. Many Paramount shareholders baulked at a previously proposed merger structure, which they argued would benefit Redstone at the cost of common shareholders. 

Redstone would remain an investor in the combined Paramount-Skydance, a move that aims to show her conviction that the Ellison-led group would turn round the fortunes of Paramount, which has struggled to compete with larger rivals such as Netflix in an expensive “streaming war”.

“There will be more alignment between [Redstone’s] interest and shareholders than before,” said one person familiar with the arrangement.

The Paramount board has set up a special committee to evaluate the plan.  

Paramount on Monday said a team of three executives — George Cheeks, Chris McCarthy and Brian Robbins — would replace Bakish, establishing an “office of the CEO”.

Bakish, who had worked at the company and its predecessor Viacom for a quarter of a century, had previously been an ally of Redstone, who promoted him to chief executive of Viacom in 2016. But their relationship has deteriorated in recent months, according to several people familiar with the matter.

Bakish was paid a total of $31.5mn in 2023, according to a regulatory filing. 

Private equity group Apollo, in partnership with rival studio Sony, is also preparing to bid on Paramount as soon as this week, according to people familiar with the situation. Paramount recently rejected Apollo’s $26bn all-cash offer, and four members of the Paramount board have since withdrawn their names for re-election in June.

Paramount on Monday reported a net loss of $554mn on $7.7bn in revenue in the first quarter. The company did not take questions on its earnings call, which lasted less than 10 minutes.

“There’s no dressing this up — looks like a car crash with clear divisions among key stakeholders,” said analyst Paolo Pescatore at PP Insights.

“The latest chapter in this ongoing saga looks to be taking another turn for the worse.”