Reproach comes as Taiwan says it has detected a large number of Chinese aircraft crossing into its air defence identification zone

Taiwan is “not for sale”, the island’s foreign minister has said in a stern rebuke to Elon Musk, who asserted Taiwan was an integral part of China, again wading into the thorny issue relations between Beijing and Taipei. His comments came as dozens of Chinese warships and planes were detected near Taiwan for suspected military exercises.

Musk, the billionaire owner of the social media platform X formerly known as Twitter, as well as the Tesla electric car company and SpaceX, made the comments to the All-In Summit in Los Angeles uploaded to YouTube this week.

“Their [Beijing’s] policy has been to reunite Taiwan with China. From their standpoint, maybe it is analogous to Hawaii or something like that, like an integral part of China that is arbitrarily not part of China mostly because … the US Pacific Fleet has stopped any sort of reunification effort by force,” he said.