$PI Elon Musk's meeting with Yang Yuanqing, Yang waited 12 years, only to see a side face of Musk, which is thought-provoking. At the Great Hall of the People in May 2026, Musk did not stand up, did not shake hands, and didn't even look directly at Yang Yuanqing, who approached him voluntarily. Yang Yuanqing, CEO of Lenovo. This is not a temper issue; it’s the quietest settlement in business history. Going back to 2014, at CCTV's "Dialogue" program, Yang Yuanqing sat cross-legged and asked Musk in front of the national audience: How many customers do you have? Musk replied: 30k. Yang Yuanqing smiled: I sell 115 million units a year, five units every second. The subtext is that Musk’s 30,000 customers are not qualified to talk business with him. That year, Lenovo earned 30k USD, Musk lost 290 million USD. Yang Yuanqing felt he had won, winning in volume and scale. But he made a fatal mistake: mistaking sales speed for a moat. Similar scripts have played out at another table. The same drama was reenacted five years later with a different protagonist. In 2019, at the Shanghai World Artificial Intelligence Conference, Jack Ma and Musk shared the stage. Musk talked about AI threats, Mars, and that human civilization has only been around for 7,000 years. Jack Ma said: I just returned from Mars. I don’t call it artificial intelligence; I call it Alibaba Intelligence. Don’t worry, in the future, we’ll work three days a week, and the rest of the time, sing and dance. The audience burst into laughter. One was discussing the probability of human survival, the other was talking about Alibaba’s intelligence. This is not a dialogue; it’s two species exchanging glances. One calculating with GDP, the other on a cosmic timescale. At that time, Jack Ma also won—laughter, applause, media headlines "Jack Ma outwitted Musk, leaving him speechless." Now, time has given the answer. The laughter still echoes in the ears, but time has already taken action. Yang Yuanqing waited 12 years for a side face; Jack Ma waited less than five years, transforming from an alien to someone in the background. Ant Group’s IPO was halted, Alibaba was fined 18.2 billion yuan, and three years of rectification cost over 25 billion yuan. Are these failures only of these two people? No, it’s a disease of the entire group. Yang Yuanqing’s arrogance comes from sales volume; Jack Ma’s arrogance from market position. The logic is astonishingly consistent: my way is the only way. One says, “I sell a lot, I am the boss,” the other says, “I understand Daxia, what do you understand?” But what’s the result? After 12 years, Lenovo’s PC business is still just PCs; Alibaba dives into finance, traffic, and innovative models; what is Musk doing? During the hardest times, when money was tight and he was mocked, he invested in things others couldn’t understand: electric vehicles, rocket reusability, brain-computer interfaces, AI computing power. One is calculating today’s accounts, the other betting on tomorrow’s fate. The emperor of short-termism is being stripped by long-termism. According to 2025 data, none of the top five global R&D spenders are from Daxia companies; their R&D investment is only a third of others’. This isn’t chasing; it’s not even in the same race. Daxia entrepreneurs are not lacking in the ability to make money; they lack the ability to persist in unprofitable or even losing ventures for ten years, and the ability to face something they don’t understand and aren’t in a hurry to mock or ridicule. Yang Yuanqing laughs at Musk’s few users; Jack Ma laughs at Musk talking about Mars; laughs at Musk not understanding business models. But time ultimately gives the answer: the clown is himself—unable to understand the future. Thinking sales are a wall? A paper wall, which falls at the slightest breeze. Market position is fate? Just the number of the least cash-strapped in fate. When the era turns the page, it does so without even a greeting. The cruelest truth in the business world: past success only proves the past, not the future. Returning to that side glance is not about cursing or holding grudges; it’s about living in a way that only commands admiration, so much so that even the act of returning a courtesy feels unnecessary. The warning from this is not “don’t offend Musk,” that’s too superficial. First, arrogance is the highest-interest loan in the world—borrow today, pay back with interest tomorrow; second, an era doesn’t give advance notice when it ends, but every arrogant expression and remark is a stamp on the farewell notice; third, a moat isn’t about today’s success but about being unreachable ten years later; fourth, even the richest must leave a seat for the future.