This week, the world’s attention was on the chemistry between President Trump and Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, at a high-stakes summit. But on Chinese social media, the bigger draw was an awkward encounter between two other men: Elon Musk and his rival, Lei Jun.
A brief, stilted interaction between Mr. Musk, who has long been a tech idol in China, and Mr. Lei, one of the country’s most prominent entrepreneurs, went viral as commentators spun a few seconds of footage into a personal drama between two business rivals.
Mr. Musk was in Beijing with a delegation of business leaders who had accompanied Mr. Trump on Air Force One. On Thursday, he joined American officials and Chinese leaders at a banquet at the Great Hall of the People, where he sat alone as a parade of executives took turns dropping into an empty seat beside him to pose for photos.
He was already grimacing and visibly huffing by the time Mr. Lei, the billionaire founder of Xiaomi, one of China’s largest electronics companies, approached him and gestured for a selfie.
Mr. Musk pulled a few faces, flashed a look of indifference, then hammed it up for the camera before turning to his phone and pretending to be busy.
The clip, only a few seconds long, went viral almost immediately. Mr. Musk even reposted it on X, the social media platform he owns, which is banned in China, where the government tightly controls the media. Some viewers chastised Mr. Lei for pestering Mr. Musk. Others claimed he had “lost face” by looking obsequious, while some came to his defense.
By Friday afternoon, the hashtag #leijunelonmuskselfie had 75 million views on Weibo, the Chinese social media platform.
“It’s just like a monkey climbing a tree,” wrote Liujishou, a social media influencer on Weibo who has 13 million followers, casting Mr. Lei’s request as an act of social climbing.
“No matter how high you climb, as soon as you look up, you see a butt.”
Mr. Musk is widely credited for spurring intense competition in China’s electric vehicle industry. His company, Tesla, manufactures half of its cars in China but local competitors are catching up fast.
Xiaomi is one of them. Mr. Lei’s company started out selling household goods and cheap smartphones before pushing into electric vehicles over the past few years. In April, Xiaomi’s SU7 model overtook Tesla’s Model Y as China’s second best-selling car, according to Dcar, an automotive information and trading platform.
The internet wasted no time generating A.I. images of the selfie from all angles: one swapped the men’s faces, leaving Mr. Musk smiling and Mr. Lei looking bored; another shot from behind showed the two men studying Mr. Lei’s phone as it displayed electric vehicle sales rankings.
Not everyone thought the criticism of Mr. Lei was fair. Li Ji, another well-known social media personality, wrote that Mr. Lei didn’t need to idolize anyone.
“At a state banquet of this caliber, did he need to prove himself?” he pondered. Selfies with Mr. Musk, he noted, were routine for Mr. Lei, who had posed with him in 2013 during a Tesla factory tour in the United States. “Elon Musk does incredibly cool things,” Mr. Lei wrote after his visit in 2013, “this guy is so amazing that he almost goes against common sense.”
Taking the picture, Li Ji added, was a clever move to “piggyback on a top global influencer’s fame” at a moment when the world was watching.
