California’s governor plans to reopen factories in the corona pandemic, but the city, where Tesla’s only auto manufacturing facility is in the United States, is reluctant. Tesla CEO Elon Musk is angry.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk threatens to move the company headquarters due to a dispute over the reopening of a factory. Tesla will move its corporate headquarters and future programs from California to Texas or Nevada with immediate effect, Musk wrote on Twitter.
He left the future of the Fremont plant in Alameda, California, with around 10,000 employees open. That will depend on how Tesla will be dealt with there in the future, Musk wrote. He would sue the district.
The background to this is a dispute over the reopening of the electric car pioneer’s only vehicle manufacturing facility in the United States. California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, said Thursday that it would allow factories to open in the state again.
However, the Alameda district had decided that the “shutdown” should continue until the end of May, with the exception of essential businesses, and had refused to reopen the Tesla plant near San Francisco as of Friday.
District also refuses limited operations
Musk had written to employees in an email that restricted operations with 30 percent of the normal workforce per shift should then be resumed. Alameda’s health authorities had said that it was not yet allowed to go back to work because restrictions to contain the coronavirus were still in place.
A district official had said on Friday that health officials had had numerous conversations with Tesla and recommended that Covid 19 infection numbers be monitored for at least a week and that safe ways to resume production should be discussed.
Musk had repeatedly criticized the lockdown as a serious threat to US companies and as unconstitutional . The entrepreneur is known to cause a sensation and confusion with powerful opinions on Twitter. Just last week, he made a series of idiosyncratic tweets that made Tesla’s market value drop by billions of dollars.
In 2018, Musk even got into trouble with the tweets from the SEC. According to an agreement with the SEC, he actually has to have the company approve relevant tweets in advance.
Tesla is currently also working on the construction of a plant in Grünheide near Berlin, which is to go into operation in 2021. Up to 12,000 employees are expected to manufacture up to 500,000 electric cars there each year.
And when it reopens, it is sued by sick employees or by relatives of deceased corona victims. Apparently Musk doesn’t care about the lives of his employees. I thought of him being more empathetic and intelligent, but ultimately it’s all about money and his ego.
I, an absolute fan of everything that Musk has done. But here he is on the level of a Trump. We cannot ignore health costs. If 5% have permanent damage after they are infected, good night health insurance premiums. Then we created expensive patients and a lot of suffering just because we couldn’t wait two or three weeks longer.