Musk book: Dallas is ‘too Texas’ for Tesla gigafactory
Fresh off winning a major U.S. biotech research hub, Dallas is aglow with optimism.
So leave it to Elon Musk, the planet’s richest man, to throw a little shade the city’s way.
In author Walter Isaacson’s highly anticipated new book, aptly titled “Elon Musk,” he details how the mercurial billionaire arrived at Austin as the site of a gigafactory that now employs over 12,000 people.
The passage starts by taking readers back to 2020, with Musk and others at Tesla tossing out city names as the site for a new electric vehicle manufacturing plant and all of them checking their phones for more information about the town. Chicago and New York were quickly ruled out as not being suitable for this purpose, according to the book.
Los Angeles or San Francisco? That’s what the Tesla executives wanted to leave behind.
“California had become too fraught with NIMBYism, clogged with regulations, plagued by meddlesome commissions and too skittish about COVID,” wrote Isaacson, who said he attended Musk’s meetings, walked his factories with him, and spent hours interviewing him, his family, friends, coworkers, and adversaries for two years.
Next came Tulsa, where local leaders engaged in a spirited and highly publicized effort to attract Tesla to Oklahoma.
Nashville? Omead Afshar, one of Musk’s top lieutenants, is quoted as saying it’s a nice place to visit but not to live.
Then came Dallas’ turn. A site in southern Dallas County might have been in contention at one point.
“Texas was alluring, but Dallas, they agreed, was too Texas,” according to the book. Ironically, Musk donned a cowboy hat at the Austin plant’s epic invitation-only opening, which was promoted as a “Cyber Rodeo.”
Austin, on the other hand, was a university town and the Tesla executives considered it to have better music and pride in “protecting its pockets of weirdness.” Hold that thought. At the end of May 2020, as Musk sat in a Cape Canaveral command center awaiting SpaceX’s first launch of human astronauts, Isaacson wrote that Musk texted Afshar with a question: “Would you rather live in Tulsa or Austin?”
“When Afshar, with all due respect to Tulsa, gave the answer Musk expected, he texted back, ‘Okay, great. We’ll do it in Austin and you should run it,’ “according to the book.
Not only did Tesla build an electric vehicle factory in Austin, but Musk eventually moved the company headquarters there from California. His attraction to Texas is almost legendary now, setting up a SpaceX Starbase in South Texas and moving offices for his neurotechnology company Neuralink and his tunneling company Boring Co. to the Austin area as well.
Oh, as for Dallas being “too Texas,” there are nearly 84,000 North Texans driving around now in EVs — with Teslas by far the dominant brand. That’s 37% of the state’s overall total.