This doesn't feel like a fair comparison: one an opaque, authoritarian country of effectively limitless resources, and the others are some individual, publicly-traded companies.
That depends on perspective.
Considering that the US companies in question have senior executives regularly passing into cabinet level and the Senate-approved slots just below then returning to their private sectors jobs one could easily argue similarly about the US. President Eisenhower gave it a name, the Military-Industrial complex, although he left out the financial industry.
The "opaque, authoritarian" and "effectively limitless resources" are again statements that beg for clarity and explicit foundation.
I am not arguing at all that the Chinese and US systems are equivalent. I am arguing that there are always ambiguities that make broad generalizations very risky. For example the Chinese system is only "opaque, authoritarian" to people who do not understand it. In actual demonstrable fact there are municipal and regional powers that tend to constrain national power. Of course they feature the easily described monolithic 'Communist' title.
My objective in raising these issues is only to point out that Tesla has a large contingent of senior executives who understand that complexity and nuance. They also have thrived in that system and managed to do so with 100% ownership. One amaro way that Tesla has maintained that is by conforming to Shanghai government labor conventions, by using Chinese suppliers as essentially Tier One (e.g. CATL) and developing exports rapidly. Further, Tesla knows and deploys Chinese publicity and approval devices with great effectiveness. Most clearly and most misunderstood is how Tesla manages to deal with conflict resolution. Those include two that have been completely misunderstood in the Occident. First, the infamous 'Model 3 brake failure' and 'military Tesla prohibition' incidents. Tesla has managed to deal with both quietly and effectively. On Tier One status also is IDRA, Italian by positioning but 100% Chinese. Tesla, by facilitating those technological marvels that are Gingapresses. That one is a precedent-setting development.
That Tesla knows how to operate effectively in China in quite evident. To the Occidentals it is 'generally known' that those 'opaque, authoritarian' people are not trustworthy or predictable, besides they 'steal our ideas and intellectual property'. The Gigapress story and CATL are just two cases in which mutual benefit is happening.
It is easily worth a minimum of 30% of TSLA value that they are fully integrated into China, pretty much unlike any other foreign company. Those two Tier One cases are just examples. There are many others.
We all should try harder to actually understand rather than casting political rhetoric.
My last point is that there simply are no perfect systems but there are some which work well in a given environment. Tesla gives us enormous value by dealing with the environment that exists rather than an idealistic vision of what might be. Now we need to find out how they'll manage the prohibition of direct sales in Texas.
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