Comment by roughly

From a geopolitics standpoint, the effective question here is “whose guns are the owners of the company worried about?” Elon is a bit of an outlier here because he’s effectively bought the government now, but in theory, if the US government decides to arrest Elon and seize his assets, that’s a big problem for Elon, whereas if China does, that’s a lesser problem for him (yes, Tesla, I know). It’s the same reason the US banned Huawei from US telecoms: the US government can’t threaten Huawei like they can Cisco.

None of this is a normative statement - I’m not saying that this is good or bad, but if you want to know why the US government thinks Elon is better than ByteDance, it’s because they can shoot Elon tomorrow if they decide to, but they can’t shoot Zhang Yiming without causing an international incident.