In the chap­ter titled “Shang­hai” cov­er­ing Tes­la’s jour­ney from 2015 to 2019, the nar­ra­tive focus­es on Robin Ren’s piv­otal role in Tes­la’s expan­sion into the Chi­nese mar­ket. Shang­hai-born Ren, a Physics Olympiad win­ner and Elon Musk’s for­mer lab part­ner at Penn, was not well-versed in auto­mo­biles. His exper­tise was in tech­nol­o­gy, hav­ing served as the chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cer at Dell Computer’s flash-dri­ve sub­sidiary. Despite his lack of auto indus­try knowl­edge, Musk sought Ren’s assis­tance to address Tes­la’s strug­gling sales in Chi­na, fol­low­ing the dis­missal of two Chi­na man­agers and fac­ing the poten­tial to fire more due to dis­mal sales fig­ures.

Musk’s strat­e­gy hinged on man­u­fac­tur­ing cars with­in Chi­na to secure mar­ket suc­cess, a notion chal­lenged by Chi­na’s require­ment for for­eign car man­u­fac­tur­ers to estab­lish joint ven­tures with local com­pa­nies. Musk, known for his reluc­tance to share con­trol, humor­ous­ly resist­ed this idea dur­ing meet­ings with Chi­nese offi­cials. Ren faced the task of either per­suad­ing Musk to accept a joint ven­ture or influ­enc­ing Chi­nese pol­i­cy to per­mit Tes­la’s inde­pen­dent man­u­fac­tur­ing oper­a­tions.

Choos­ing to advo­cate for pol­i­cy change, Ren engaged in per­sis­tent lob­by­ing with the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment, empha­siz­ing the ben­e­fits to Chi­na’s clean-ener­gy ambi­tions of host­ing a Tes­la fac­to­ry. This effort, aligned with Pres­i­dent Xi Jin­ping’s vision for Chi­na as a clean-ener­gy pow­er­house, cul­mi­nat­ed in Tes­la’s per­mis­sion in ear­ly 2018 to build a fac­to­ry with­out a joint ven­ture, mark­ing a sig­nif­i­cant depar­ture from three decades of Chi­nese man­u­fac­tur­ing pol­i­cy. This chap­ter cap­tures the blend of per­son­al con­nec­tion, strate­gic nego­ti­a­tion, and pol­i­cy advo­ca­cy that under­pinned Tes­la’s break­through in one of the world’s largest auto mar­kets.