Bloomberg Businessweek Weekend: October 23rd, 2026

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This is Bloomberg Businessweek Daily. Reporting from the magazine that helps global leaders stay ahead. With insight on the people, companies, and trends shaping today's complex economy. Plus, global business, finance, and tech news as it happens. Bloomberg Businessweek Daily. With Carol Masser and Tim Stenevek on Bloomberg Radio. Hi, everyone.

Welcome to the weekend edition of Bloomberg Businessweek. Earnings season is officially in full swing and a massive focus for us. Big tech, including meta platforms and SpaceX and Tesla, all came out with their quarterly updates. Also interesting, Elon Musk floating the idea that SpaceX and Tesla could become one company, something that many have been speculating about. The actuality of it, we're just going to have to wait on that. Also, some upbeat insight, too, on Anthropic's future spend on computing power.

So all of these details can be found on the Bloomberg and at Bloomberg.com. And don't forget, on tap this coming week, we'll get results from some of the biggest market cap companies in the world, those hyperscalers, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon.

The fun continues.

Is that what you call it?

Yeah.

I mean, quarterly. I love this stuff.

I do, too.

And speaking of that, results from another mega cap tech company, Apple. You'll have to wait for that since they don't report until November. We talk about Apple all the time. We get great insight thanks to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman and team. Apple, though, is really what we wanted to drill down into today, specifically a book that tells the story of how the company built a competitive market in the authoritarian state of Chinese President Xi Jinping. And really, who came out the bigger winner? On that, the award-winning journalist Patrick McGee joins us to talk about his book, Apple in China, the Capture of the World's Greatest Company.

We're going to get to that shortly. We begin with one of the most read stories over the past few weeks, one that made waves from Silicon Valley to Washington, D.C. The story about the legendary venture capitalist, once an early mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, and as Bloomberg's Austin Carr reports, in many ways was the original hoodie-wearing tech bro.

Today, his dominant VC firm, which manages more than $ 100 billion in assets, has gone from valley kingmaker to D.C. power broker. We are talking about Marc Andreessen, the early investor associated with a who's who of today's tech giants, writing about him for Bloomberg Businessweek. Austin Carr, Bloomberg Businessweek senior writer.

I cannot stress how famous this guy is in the tech world. You might remember him back in the late 90s on the cover of Time magazine as one of the golden geeks leading America into the future when he invented Netscape. And more recently, what people don't realize is after diving deep into the venture capital world, he's now funneling huge amounts of money into DC. Between him and his firm, Andreessen Horowitz, and their partners, they funneled at least $ 116 million leading up to the midterms. That's more than the Kochs. That's more than George Soros. It's really only behind Elon Musk and his donations to federal politics that Andreessen is behind. And it's just this massive shift from someone who is really known traditionally synonymous with Silicon

Valley startups on the board of Facebook, now Meta. And now he's just become one of the biggest backers of the Trump 2.0 movement.

As you write, he voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and said back then that the president's immigration regime, quote, makes me sick to my stomach. I love your story because you really get into something that in the last couple of years has become really lore around the narrative of Mark Andreessen's transformation from a Democrat to a Republican.

It has to do with a meeting with the Biden administration about AI policy. I mean, I have heard so many times people explain a different version of what happened in that meeting and why it led to him supposedly embracing the Trump administration's policies. It really seems like, though, in this piece, Austin, you got to the truth of what happened in that room. Explain the context here and what happened.

Well, when we talk about the shift of the tech community to the right or to support of Trump since his first term, it's very rare that you could actually pinpoint the day for someone. And with Marc Andreessen, he actually has said it was May 22nd, 2024. And that's when he, his partner, his co-founder, Ben Horowitz, and their government affairs chief went for a West Wing visit when the Biden was still in office to discuss U.S. tech policy with a number of Biden officials. And they met to discuss tech policy issues. The meeting was quickly forgotten.

Fast forward, Trump wins the election. And then in early 2025 or late 24, he starts going on podcasts and describing this sort of insane meeting in which all these Biden officials apparently threatened to ban all AI startups. They were going to classify the underlying math under AI. They were going to concentrate power into the hands of just two to three tech companies, which the federal government would oversee immediately. And essentially, Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, according to their version of Vince, walked out of the West Wing and in that very day in the parking lot, they said, this is crazy. They're going to kill us. We have to vote for Trump. Now, since that, I've spent so long piecing what happened together. And I can tell you

that a lot of people disagree, at least in the Biden and Harris, Kamala Harris camps about Mark's version of events.

Hmm.

They say nothing of the sort happened. At no point did anyone ever threaten to say that they were going to ban all AI startups. And I would just say on the surface, I think it's worth thinking about, you know, they already had a contentious relationship with Marc Andreessen. Why on earth would, at this sudden point, they would reveal this draconian plan out of the blue to an investor they're trying to essentially win over to support him in the coming presidential election? And suddenly they reveal this Top secret plan to him, Ben and their government affairs chief and no one else. And then the other very unusual thing is two days later, later, we discovered that Mark Andreessen goes back to have another meeting with different national

security advisors and Biden officials at the White House. He doesn't bring this up at all. So it just raises a lot of questions to me about whether or not there's no doubt that this was a contentious meeting, but whether or not he was looking for some sort of conversion event or sort of narrative to tell. why he's switching over to Trump. I will just say people on the Biden side do not feel that that was an accurate depiction of what happened in that room.

Does it does it your story, though, it talks you spoke to a lot of folks for this story and you you really, I think, successfully expressed to us. how people view his psyche. In some one case, somebody said he's prone to hyperbole. There's a great kicker about grudges at the end of the story. What does it tell you or tell all of us about just the way that he thinks about the world, perhaps?

Well, I think in sort of reporting the story, and I spent a lot of time, I mean, more than 18 months reporting the story. I went to spend time where he grew up in Wisconsin and I've talked to endless number of people who we worked with in the early days of, who we went to college with and worked on the original Mosaic, the precursor to the consumer web browser that later became Netscape. I've talked to people who have worked with Andreessen, who have a zillion co-founders who were backed by Andreessen Horowitz. And one of the consistent patterns from the fourth grader who sat behind Mark for much of his childhood is, in school to an Andreessen-backed founder was that he does have a questionable relationship

with the truth. He is prone to hyperbole, but there's something very specific. The pattern that emerged over this time is he experiences an event, doesn't speak about it. Years pass. And then in retrospect, he claims that he was a victim in some sort of circumstance that people involved in that experience are just unfamiliar with. And perhaps the most profound example of that is people who he grew up in Wisconsin, even his family members. And we can talk more about that, but essentially at a.

High school level.

Well, what struck you about that and what it tells you about Marc Andreessen?

Well, so just to set the scene, you know, he grew up in rural Wisconsin, Carol, as you mentioned at the top of the segment. And, you know, over the decades, he described this very rough and tumble life, you know, having to chop wood one winter to heat the family home, sort of, you know, sort of a local community that didn't understand him and didn't seem to offer much in support by way of, you know, computers or, you know, it was a sports sort of rural community that just prioritized football over what his interests were. And, You know, spending time there, I found quite the opposite. It was, you know, it was actually kind of a very standard middle of class, middle America upbringing. His family was actually

on the more well-off end of the town. In fact, kids told me he was the first kid in class to have a computer. I talked to one good friend of his growing up that remembers seeing the first modem in his life at Mark's house because his dad had one through work back in the mid 1980s. That's such a rare thing. And Mark used to, I mean, that was his, I mean, it's very touching in a lot of ways. That was the first time he gained access in a way to the Internet. And he went on to pioneer the modern Internet browser. And I just think there is such a distortion about what happened during that his upbringing. And it's a pattern that repeats itself later on in the Biden years and the Trump years.

But.

What it says about this is this is a guy that is feel aggrieved that I remember speaking to one person he went to college with and who just said, you know, I've always gotten the sense that Mark just feels like the world doesn't appreciate all he's contributed enough. And a part of me understands that. I mean, he was heralded to be the next Bill Gates. It didn't quite work out that way. But in a lot of ways, he's had more influence behind the scenes through his venture capital firm, his more recent investing in Washington, D.C., and He's really reshaped the planet to his vision. But there is a sense of grudge that it hasn't quite been enough for him.

Well, his role or position in politics, I mean, how much of his and Andreessen's shift is ideological? And how much is it because of business interests? I mean, you think about what they're exposed to, crypto, defense, other things that are certainly near and dear to this administration.

Yeah, I mean, the fascinating thing is the only consistent part about Andreessen's political leanings are that they're very inconsistent. You know, if I went back, I studied the last three years of his political donations all the way back to when he was eligible to vote. And I'll say during the Gore years, 90 plus percent go to Democrats.

Then he cuts it off for Kerry because Kerry has a policy he disagrees with. Then he 90 percent go toward Democrats during the Obama years. Then the other direction for Romney, then toward Clinton and now back. after the Biden years, to Trump. And there has been this seesawing between those political parties. Yes, on the surface, I think it's expedient. But I think on a larger level, what he really wants, you know, just at least in a good example from the modern recent years in the debates about AI, one former Trump official told me he realized that the best AI policy for Marc Andreessen is no AI policy. So I really think what he's advocating for is to keep government out of his business. That's the

fundamental thing. sort of, I guess, moral grounding that he has in D.C.

So you end the story talking about Andreessen, and you mentioned this, I greatly value my grudges. So you've talked to so many different people, friends, founders, investors, you know, those who have fallen out with him. Is that ultimately the key to understanding him and his action, someone kind of driven by a vision of technological progress or by a desire to really defeat the institutions and people he believes kind of have wronged him?

You know, I wish it was that black and white, unfortunately. I mean, or fortunately. I mean, to be honest, I like writing about this guy because he has had a huge impact on the planet. He did come from a very rural part of the country. What he's achieved is nothing sort of like spectacular.

It really is.

Yeah.

And what I've come to realize and what people have described is there's different versions of Mark. There's, you know, the podcast Mark, the social media Mark, the investor Mark. You know, there is the Wisconsin, Mark. And I will just say I cannot tell you the number of founders who I talked to, like Patrick Collison from Stripe or Max Levchin, the PayPal co-founder who went on to found Affirm or the CEO of Flock Safety who described Mark as the most brilliant guy on a board level. He's a genius. You know, Patrick Collison told me this story about the time he fell sick and Andreessen showed up at the hospital for three hours to spend with him.

And there are these moments that are very touching and quite huming. And yeah, there's this other side of Mark that is a completely different person.

That was Austin Carr, Bloomberg Businessweek senior writer.

Coming up, how Apple helped build China's tech power and at what geopolitical cost.

Our conversation with Patrick McGee, investigative journalist and author of the book, Apple in China, the capture of the world's greatest company.

That's coming up next.

You're listening to Bloomberg Businessweek.

This is Bloomberg.

This is Bloomberg Business Week Daily with Carol Masser and Tim Stenevek on Bloomberg Radio.

Safe to say we follow Apple so closely. We love talking with our Mark Gurman, who follows it very closely. It is, of course, one of the largest market cap companies in the world, a company whose brand, whose products, whose supply chain, whose deafness in managing tricky politics in the United States and in China is revered by many.

And yet, as investigative journalist Patrick McGee wrote in his New York Times bestseller that was named by the Times, by the New Yorker, by the Washington Post, by Foreign Affairs, by the Globe and Mail as one of the best books written in 2025, he writes about the rise of Apple and how it led to an even greater rise by China and perhaps at a huge cost. or implications, certainly for the company and maybe for the world at large.

Patrick is a former journalist at the Financial Times. His book was out in May of 2025. But with everything going on, we wanted to bring him in.

And I'm going to be quite honest.

I was listening to a podcast with Anthony Scaramucci before he came on. And Patrick, he mentioned your book. He loved it. He loved it. It is entitled Apple in China, the Capture of the World's Greatest Company. And Patrick is joining us from the Bloomberg News San Francisco Bureau. It is great to have you here. It is a company we talk about so much. And then we think about the rise of China as well. I want to ask you, when you set out to write the book, did you have an idea of the story that you wanted to tell?

Or did it really evolve as you dug more and more into things?

So I wrote a 70 page book pitch to get the book deal. So I certainly had a pretty clear sense of what the book was going to say. But nevertheless, I ended up being flabbergasted by the extent to which Apple had a massive influence on China. So if you've read the book, you know that the thesis in a sense is that Apple had a nation building like influence on China. It would be trivial to say that Apple wouldn't be Apple without China. I actually argue that China wouldn't be China without Apple. It's a sort of thesis that sounds, I think, pretty unhinged, even bonkers. But if you go through the 400 pages, I think it's pretty well stacked up. So I didn't think that I was going in that direction. I was trying to write a

standard corporate history of how Apple became the most valuable company on the planet and ended up writing something that had geopolitical implications, the likes of which I had de minimis understanding before tackling the project.

Well, I think what's so notable is what happened since you wrote the book. And that's the fact that Tim Cook is out as CEO, but he remains as executive chair. And in his role as executive chair, he continues to meet with the heads of state of many countries throughout the world, including China, including the United States. And just in the last couple of weeks, he was at that state dinner with Xi Jinping in Washington, D.C. On the individual, the people who made this possible, who at Apple was the most responsible for Apple's role in China?

That's a good question.

I mean, I don't want to give the boring answer of Tim Cook, but of course, he was the CEO since 2011. I mean, it certainly wasn't Steve Jobs, right? Steve Jobs, as far as I know, if someone wants to prove me wrong, go ahead, never stepped foot in China in his whole life. So as instrumental as he was for Apple and product design, he was not the guy running operations or making the decisions, never went to China.

But Tim Cook... Yeah, go ahead.

Sorry.

But Tim Cook was there all the time.

Now, that being said, Tim Cook traditionally goes to China two or three times a year. And it's certainly not difficult to find people who were living in China on behalf of Apple or going there so many times per year that they would say the idea that Tim Cook is the reason that either we're succeeding in China or whatever.

is faintly ridiculous because, of course, he's more orchestrating things from Cupertino, but there are people on the ground, in the weeds, you know, training suppliers and that sort of thing.

So it's not a particular individual, I would say.

It's the unit called manufacturing design, a unit within Apple that specifically goes from Cupertino or from other parts of Asia, but traditionally from Cupertino to factories across Asia and over time increasingly directly to China to train up factories, right? You know, we're talking millions upon millions of people were trained at the behest of Apple to meet their quality demands and then to learn how to retain that quality as they scaled. And the result of that was the formation of entire industrial clusters devoted to building something like the iPhone, which, of course, goes from 5 million units in 2007 to 230 million by 2015. So.

Yeah, sorry.

The reason I don't think that's a boring answer is because Tim Cook may have become CEO in 2011, but Tim Cook was the supply chain guy for a decade before this. So he was the one who was figuring out where in the world these things could be made.

And also.

the supply chains and the complicated supply chains that would make this possible.

So I'm slightly being pedantic, but I would say that I disagree with the general notion that Tim Cook was the architect of the China strategy. That's sort of the word people had used to describe him before I wrote the book. I would say you can give him a nice title like Admiral rather than architect. The reason I say that is because when Apple adopts an outsourcing strategy in 1996 and then consolidates basically everything to China in 2003 and It's not really that they're deciding, hey, you know what's a good place to manufacture?

It's China.

It's that hundreds of suppliers who had previously been in America, but principally in Korea and Japan and especially Taiwan, they were moving to China. And so I say admiral because Tim Cook sort of navigated the macroeconomic seas better than anybody else. But he didn't actually sort of build or decide that China was the answer. They were kind of late to the game of both outsourcing and moving to China because They just did better than everybody else.

So I want to go to, you know, I think about Apple when it was thinking about starting its investments and having its manufacturing happen in China. I would imagine, and I think you cite an Apple engineer talking about visiting suppliers in the southern Chinese manufacturing center, Shenzhen. It's also something that the Times I know highlighted too, was horrified that there were no elevators in the slapdash facility.

That the stairs were built with troubling irregularity with, say, 12 steps of varying heights between the first and second floors and 18 to the next and 16 and 24. Apple, if you think about this company, Patrick, you know, design and even the packaging, everything is so immaculate. Like to go over there. And understand kind of what they were walking into initially. I always think about corporate conscience or thinking, is this really the right thing? Or did they really play into that narrative that the whole world did at that time of, we're going to go over there and we're going to help the plight of Chinese workers. We're going to create better situations for them.

Is that what it was?

Was part of their thinking?

You know, my favorite quote in the book comes from a former vice president at Apple. We're having coffee. And I'm asking him all these geopolitical questions about the rise of China. And he says to me, are you sure you're not overthinking your thesis? Because you keep talking about geopolitics. But I can tell you, I was there in China when we were building up the supply chain in the early 2000s. And we weren't thinking about geopolitics at all.

And that might as well be on the back of the book. That is the thesis in a nutshell. That Apple was.

Very engineering-minded, perfectionist mindset, very product-focused, and wasn't sending people over to sort of learn Mandarin and affairs of state and understand the perspective of their partners. They were there to get stuff done. And they had really demanding bosses making sure they got stuff done. And I don't think they quite realized the implications or consequences of what it meant to scale just enormous quantities of the most iconic product of the 21st century. in a country just as it became an adversary of the U.S. I mean, that's the whole tension of the narrative right there.

It is. It's incredible. Go there, and forgive me, I know you have said this a million times over, certainly listening to podcasts and so on and so forth, but the size and scope in terms of the amount of money that was invested over and over again by Apple continues, or although we know that they are kind of spreading out in terms of manufacturing. Give us some of the numbers.

Give us that size and scope, if you will.

Yeah, so within the narrative context here, what happens is that Xi Jinping comes into power in 2013, and Apple is within 36 hours on the back foot, basically put in a position where they think our products might get blacklisted. Not an idle threat. Facebook had been blacklisted. Google had been blacklisted. And Apple had become, by this point, the most successful retailer within China and the most successful operator.

So the idea that it's going to have a problem in China, both in terms of manufacturing and selling, becomes something close to an existential crisis And Apple has to.

Figure out what to do.

In figuring out what to do, there's this gang of characters called the Gang of Eight, sort of the eyes and ears of Cupertino on the ground, senior people living in China for the first time ever, despite having a presence there for 20 years at that point. And they and the government affairs team essentially do a supply chain audit, a supply chain study, and recognize that what they're investing into Chinese factories is $ 55 billion per year. To be clear, this does not count the components. I'm not talking about aluminum chassis or anything like that. If you were to count that, it would double or triple the figure. This is just counting the machinery that Apple was purchasing and putting on suppliers' production lines. And crucially, it was the

wages of up to three million people per year in the in the in the in the Apple supply chain, principally concentrated in China, of course. And so this is not a figure that's been updated. I don't think Apple internally tallies it. But effectively, what happens is this study goes to Tim Cook. And in May 2016, he, Lisa Williams, and his operating chief, Jeff Williams, go to Jiangnanhai. That's like the citadel of communist power, the equivalent of the White House, if you will. And they promised to quintuple that figure over five years. So they promised to invest $ 275 billion into Chinese factories. The reason why this is important is because at the time, Xi Jinping.

his chief policy was called Made in China 2025.

In effect, the idea was we're going to make the world dependent on China and we're going to be less dependent on the world. So it's a play to indigenize innovation, right? Indigenize production in the country. And Apple basically realizes, this is of course my wording, not theirs, we are the biggest contributor of Made in China 2025. And the reason why Beijing is upset with us is they have no idea how much we are doing to up-train the engineering, up-skill and train engineering forces across the country. So this figure is enormous, and it's so big that I couldn't find another example of a corporation investing that much in another country, so I had to go to nation-building efforts, right?

And so if you take the Marshall Plan, which was America and some allies investing in 16 countries to a devastated Europe after World War II, in 2015 dollars, that was $ 131 billion invested in four years. So the Cook Plan, if you will, was double the amount in a similar time period And whereas the Marshall Plan, if you remember from your high school textbooks, is effectively an investment to ward off the threat of communism from the Soviet Union, sort of like making hay, becoming more popular in places like France or Eastern Europe. The idea was to ward off communism. The Cook Plan is the opposite. It's a way to ingratiate Apple with communist rulers in Beijing so that they can continue to have shareholder success there.

So it's quite a remarkable comparison.

Apple knew exactly what they were doing.

Look, some people, even at Apple, have questions that I've said a lot of this was inadvertent on the part of Apple because people will say Apple seemed to know everything that they were doing. And that's up for a healthy debate, let's just say. In a certain sense, I would still say they were an engineering-focused organization that wasn't thinking about the geopolitical implications of what they were doing.

On the other hand, they absolutely began to understand that the impact they were having was meaning that all of their competitors were becoming Chinese. And if I had one criticism, if there's one point where things could have gone differently, it really was when Xi Jinping came into power in 2013 and Apple had what I call this political awakening.

And that's around the same period. I believe that's the same year where Tim Cook instituted something Steve Jobs had never done, which was shareholder buybacks and I think dividends as well. And Apple spends more than $ 100 billion per year. on share buybacks and dividends, right? More than all seven of Wall Street's top seven banks spend on share buybacks and dividends. So it's hard to understand how large Apple is.

I mean, it's just absolutely enormous. And I think if they had spent, let's say, half of that, some fraction of that on supply chain resiliency and making sure they really had a plan B outside of China, I don't think Apple would be in the sort of existential vulnerable position that they're in today.

Still ahead on Bloomberg Businessweek, more with Patrick McGee. He's the author of the book, Apple in China, The Capture of the World's Greatest Company.

That's next. This is Bloomberg.

This is Bloomberg Businessweek Daily with Carol Masser and Tim Stenevek on Bloomberg Radio.

Let's get back to our conversation with Patrick McGee, investigative journalist and author of the book, Apple in China, The Capture of the World's Greatest Company.

Perhaps the manufacturing side of this brings us to a good place to talk about Hanhai Precision Technology, the company that I think more people know as Foxconn, a Taiwanese company, but with a huge presence in China. What is its role in this buildup?

So Terry Guo founded Foxconn in 1974, right? Two years before two guys named Steve launched Apple. And for a while, it's really a Taiwanese company that's doing some pretty boring things. Foxconn, con comes from connector because it was doing connectors inside computers. And even before that, it was doing things like television knobs, plastic injection molding of these things, and really undercutting others on price in the Western markets just because they could do things in Taiwan. So Terry Guo was very savvy, not just in terms of building things, but in terms of political connections. And he used to tour America and finds people like Michael Dell, bring them to factories and demonstrate what he was capable of. And in the late 1990s, he,

I think, is the first person to understand that Apple, this fledgling company that was sort of on the magazine covers, famously Bloomberg Businessweek, that it was close to bankruptcy and so forth, Nobody really wanted to be working with it, not just because their volumes were low, but because they're so demanding, right? Like Apple would send these engineers to your factories, breathe down the neck of everybody and just, you know, reject every components, right? Just sort of force a level of quality and discipline onto the workforce that basically nobody wanted to deal with. And Terry Guo understood that the learning that his team received from Apple coming in and sort of taking control of his factories was

was way more important than any profits that he could gain from the company. So other companies looked at Apple and said, they negotiate too hard and we don't earn anything.

Why would we work with this company?

And Terry Guo is the brilliant mastermind who figures out that it's not about the profits, it's about the learning. And if we can train up our force to please Apple and receive their training to please Apple, we'll be able to please anyone. And Foxconn since 2001 has been the largest contract manufacturer in the world, with Apple as their number one client that entire period.

And that's what's kind of wild, Patrick. You talk about all the investments that Apple did into China, but it's not like they actually owned the factories or anything. But what they did is spent money, but they were teaching their expertise in the process of how to do things. And I think about where we are today, whether it's EVs or you name it. I mean, anybody talks about manufacturing, they're like, you got to go to China because their level of expertise... is beyond everyone else's.

Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you one funny anecdote. I've given talks about this book to Apple suppliers and a whole host of other companies. And one small hardware company in the Bay Area moved their operations from Vietnam to China upon reading the book because I gather the book was so convincing that Shenzhen was the place to get everything done. The irony here, of course, is, you know, it's sort of told in a neutral sense. If you finish the book, I mean, maybe in the conclusion, it's a little more biting. But generally speaking, it's just sort of one thing after another. without me interjecting my political voice.

But the subtext is kind of screaming at you that America has a real problem here of how dependent we are on a foreign rival that's four times the size of our population and so on and so forth, right? And so the idea that someone is going to move their operations to China upon reading the book.

On the one hand, it's amusing. And of course, it's a little disappointing.

But I'm also sort of heartened by the fact that I really do try to write without my own political interjections. And so for someone to sort of use the book and derive value from it, but from a totally different political standpoint, I suppose, it pleases me very much.

What about when you think about something like TSMC and you write about it and you say, well, maybe, you know, we talk about the political vulnerabilities, where it's located, you know, and what China... the pressure that it could possibly be. TSMC is so crucial to all of the semiconductors that are made in this world. You write in the book that maybe the biggest concern is that it's on a major earthquake fault, and that might be the bigger problem.

But I do think about, you know, here we are, this war, forgive me as I kind of try to make this connection, but U.S. war against Iran and Iran being able to kind of bring much of the world to its knees by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz and energy. We were lucky in the U.S. because we've got energy independence, if you will. But at the same time, semiconductors, China could bring the world to its knees, whether it's rare earths or semiconductor manufacturing. I mean, how do you think about the vulnerability of the U.S., of all these major companies, or the world at large, as you look at China and its power today?

I mean, this is the biggest overriding issue, because I think the layperson has some understanding that China, in terms of manufacturing dominance... has peaked and that there's a big re-industrialization narrative taking place in America. I think there's substantially no evidence for that. Of course, you can find anecdotes of things being produced in America. But in terms of the actual statistics, it's just not the case at all.

since Donald Trump in the first term put out policies to really hamper China, you have had a decline in the trade surplus that China has with the U.S., but China's trade surplus with the world has gotten far, far larger, right? The last time I looked at this was a few months ago. I think it was $ 1. 2 trillion surplus for last year, and then the first three or four months of this year had gone up by another 15%. So if you're narrowly looking just at U.S.-China trade, you can get some statistics that look like, oh, we really are sort of rebalancing this relationship. But it's only because China is savvy in terms of having products go to India or Vietnam or someplace else first and then go to China.

The U.S., right?

So it's still principally made in China. I mean, the iPhone is a great example of this. It's still principally made in China, but if the final step, what's called FATP, Final Assembly Test Impact, is done in Karnataka, then it gets a Made in India stamp, and voila, it looks like we have a deficit now with India versus China, but nothing's actually changed. So that's one part of the equation.

So I'm someone who worries that China already has huge dominance, and if you look at where they're investing in AI... It's not on this sort of airy-fairy artificial general intelligence that's going to solve cancer within 10 years. It is 3%, 5% improvements on the production line at hundreds, if not thousands, of factories across the country. And so if you think about where China has advantages in terms of production lines, they have an advantage that if you're an optimist, is measured in years.

If you're a pessimist, is measured in decades. And once they supercharge that with AI.

I mean, they're already on a trajectory to have 45% of global manufacturing production by 2030, according to the United Nations. That was a 2024 prediction. It was essentially made without AI in mind. So they could get even better. You think of what our advantages are in software, on the frontier models and so forth. Even someone like David Sachs would measure that in months. So it concerns me the degree to which our dependence on China is is getting greater and greater. What I do like is that the narrative is very much out there, right? A book like chip war, which came up before me by Chris Miller. Um, you know, certainly people in Congress, it's a bipartisan issue, have a real understanding, but an understanding of the problem

is very different from actually like solving the diagnosis.

Well, okay. So really any changes there.

The problem is diagnosed and it's a bipartisan understanding, as you mentioned. But I think the challenge is the infrastructure that exists right now and also sort of the natural monopolies that exist as a result of cost of manufacturing and what physical infrastructure has been set up in these respective countries. If there were a lesson for policymakers about how you think you would recommend that the U.S. and Canada and North America or the so-called West remain or try to get ahead and do not allow China to dominate, what would it be?

So it's a great question, but you're sort of presupposing that there's one answer. And unfortunately, I think there's probably 20 and each one of them is insurmountable in its own way. And so it's a respectable question. I mean, I totally get it. But for instance, you know, China has more than 300 million migrant workers who go from factory town to factory town for a defined period, maybe of a couple of years before going back to their homes.

the place where they grew up to raise their children, right? They're not allowed to bring their children and have them go to public school. So they're there on a temporary basis. Well, 300 million people, I mean, that's greater than the working population of America. And those are people that are going to fill the factories and take on some other jobs in the services industries and stuff. I mean, we're just not going to compete in the way that China competes.

So in the same way, to use like a sports analogy, like if I'm Steph Curry, and I'm going against a team that has twin tower centers, I'm not trying to play the twin tower game. I'm going to rely on my three-point shooting or something, right? America has to find what its advantages are rather than trying to replicate industrial policy in China because we don't have the same assets of whether people or infrastructure or what have you to make it work. And I think our great advantage is is our allies and our ideals, right? The fact that we have dozens of allies, China technically has one in North Korea, and then it has like quasi-allies in the form of Iran and Russia.

But the global network.

Of interdependence set up after World War II is America's lasting advantage. And I feel the Trump administration is often overlearning the lesson of how things have been deindustrialized. And they're not in favor of more and more relationships with Mexico or India. I want a NAFTA on steroids. That's not what the MAGA crowd wants at all. But I think having interdependence with all these other countries is our advantage.

And India has some of the infrastructure and people to replicate the China strategy in a way that Pittsburgh doesn't.

Patrick, don't kill me. 30 seconds. I mean, so is this really, I mean, it's kind of an Apple and China story, but do you really feel like, especially in the environment we are today, that this is a really big message about China to the world?

Yes, absolutely.

I mean, you know, China books don't sell well. I don't think the average person really wants to sort of study the political system in of a foreign country that doesn't speak English. I mean, it's quite difficult to grapple with. And so I would say the greatest, like I wasn't anticipating this, but the thing that I love most about my book is the way that people have seen it as a sort of introduction to China's rise over the last 30 years, because it's an intimidatingly large and complex country, but what better way to get to know it than through the sexy six inch thing in your pocket that you stare at for four or five hours a day.

Our thanks to Patrick McGee, investigative journalist and author of the book, Apple in China, the capture of the world's greatest company.

And that wraps up the weekend edition of Bloomberg Businessweek from Bloomberg Radio. Thank you so much for joining us.

Be sure to tune into Bloomberg Businessweek daily, Monday through Friday, starting at 2 p.m. Wall Street time on Bloomberg Radio, Bloomberg TV, and on Sirius XM channel 121.

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Find our Bloomberg Business Week podcast at Bloomberg.com, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. The latest edition of the magazine. It's available on newsstands now at Bloomberg.com and always on the Bloomberg Terminal. I'm Tim Stenevek.

And I'm Carol Master. Have a good and safe weekend, everyone. Do stay with us. Today's top stories and global business headlines are coming up right now.

Bloomberg Businessweek Weekend: October 23rd, 2026

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