Elon Musk’s Twitter chatter is back in news. Fortunately though, it is for a rather interesting, business reason this time.
Ever since Tesla reported its first quarterly profit last year, Musk has been vocal on Twitter, expressing his full gamut of emotions on the company performing well. The recently announced second quarterly profit, followed by Tesla breaching the $100 billion market cap mark, made Musk even more expressive.
This time around, Musk has gone to Twitter to ask users if they feel Tesla should come up with a gigafactory in Texas. Musk put up a question on Twitter, “Giga Texas?”, with two options, “Hell Yeah” and “nope”. Unsurprisingly, over 80% of the users replied with a ‘hell yeah’. Those who did come up with ‘nope’, suggested alternative sites, ranging from Michigan to Canada to India and what not.
Giga Texas?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 5, 2020
Musk is known to frequent Twitter, often transparently taking suggestions for all of his companies, from the massive following that he has.
The gigafactory question however, does hold some solid ground. Tesla currently operates two gigafactories in the US and one in China. Musk recently confirmed another one of these coming up near Berlin, highlighting how he has been successfully able to mitigate production issues which once almost brought Tesla to a complete shutdown. The China factory in particular, was completed in a record time, thanks to Elon’s vision and the high-end, highly efficient Chinese construction tactics. The factory recently started rolling out commercial Tesla models for Asian buyers.
However, Musk has repeatedly talked about the need to ramp up production even further. During an earnings conference call last week, Musk said that Tesla needs to increase its battery capacity to produce high-capacity models like Cybertruck. “We’ve got to scale battery production to crazy levels that people cannot even fathom today. That’s the real problem,” he said. Hence, the Twitter question.
It is still not clear though, as to whether this ‘Giga Texas’ stuff will materialise. But looking at history, it sure as hell could. Stay tuned.
