Elon Musk took aim at a signature Biden administration legislative proposal and said China is adjusting to its growing position as a dominant world power in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

The Tesla Inc. chief executive criticized federal efforts meant to spur electric-vehicle adoption, including a bill that would boost incentives for buying battery-powered cars.

The...

Elon Musk took aim at a signature Biden administration legislative proposal and said China is adjusting to its growing position as a dominant world power in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

The Tesla Inc. chief executive criticized federal efforts meant to spur electric-vehicle adoption, including a bill that would boost incentives for buying battery-powered cars.

The House has passed a roughly $2 trillion social-spending and climate bill championed by President Biden that would give consumers a tax credit of (as much as $12,500 if they buy an electric vehicle assembled by union workers using American-built batteries. Vehicles made in nonunion factories, such as Tesla’s, would qualify for a smaller credit.

The Senate has yet to vote on the measure.

“Honestly, I would just can this whole bill,” Mr. Musk said during a virtual appearance at the WSJ’s CEO Council Summit, speaking from a factory Tesla is building in the Austin, Texas, area.

He also said that federal funding for electric-vehicle charging is unnecessary. The infrastructure package that Mr. Biden signed into law in November includes $7.5 billion to expand the nation’s network of electric-vehicle charging stations.

“Do we need support for gas stations? We don’t,” he said. “Delete it.”

Mr. Musk, who is often critical of U.S. authorities, including President Biden, has struck a more conciliatory tone when it comes to the Chinese government.

“There are a lot of people in the government in China who kind of grew up…with China being a small economy and maybe who feel like China was pushed around a lot. They haven’t fully appreciated the fact that China really is going to be the big kid on the block,” he said.

Mr. Musk added that Tesla has a good relationship with China, home to the company’s largest vehicle factory by output.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk talks about what’s next for Tesla and SpaceX, the role of government in business and provides an update on the Starship launch. Photo: Ralph Alswang for the Wall Street Journal The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition

“I don’t mean to endorse everything China does any more than I would, say, endorse everything the United States does, or any country,” he said.

In the interview, Mr. Musk touched on other issues, saying that CEO is a made-up title, and that he splits his time roughly equally between running Tesla and his rocket company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX.

“I triage the tasks and try to do the things that are most useful,” he said.

Mr. Musk said SpaceX’s work developing its Starship rocket absorbs more of his mental focus than any other single initiative. Starship, designed to be a reusable orbital rocket, is such a tough challenge it makes him wonder whether he can pull off the project, he said.

Building the rocket could reduce the cost of getting to orbit by a factor of 100 or more, he said, adding that creating such a space vehicle could be the difference between whether humanity does or doesn’t become a multiplanetary species.

—Micah Maidenberg contributed this article.