[1]https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/shanghai-to-s-f-flig...
[2]https://www.macrumors.com/2019/01/11/apple-united-airline-pu...
It's hard to say from the outside what the goals would be - pushing him in certain directions, extracting intel, etc.
For this it would be much easier if the Chinese spies banged Nvidia engineers.