On May 20, 2020, a financial analyst for the City of Tulsa emailed some co-workers: “Notice: there is a [press conference] happening underneath the Golden Elon right now. Random speakers talking up T-town. Small crowd clapping. Tesla cars parked all around. Myr about to speak. We are now in the last stages of desperation.”
That last sentence would come to define a period of a few months in 2020, when Tulsa jockeyed, battled, and ultimately overplayed its hand in an attempt to get Elon Musk to place Tesla’s next factory here.
The attempt was plagued by weird stunts like GitWit’s painting of Elon Musk’s face being draped over the Golden Driller’s, whose belt buckle now read “TESLA” instead of “TULSA.” Then there was Ken Levit writing in an email that a colleague had “reached out to a high level person at Tesla—TULSA could easily change its name.” (Presumably to “Tesla.”) G.T. Bynum suggested on X (then Twitter) that the Tulsa Police Department would use Cybertrucks as their squad cars.
Tulsa’s competition for the Tesla factory was Austin, whose size and tech lineage made it the obvious choice: The Director of Employment for the City of Tulsa reported that Tesla had given them a five to ten percent chance of winning. Obviously, Austin won out. In retrospect, I’m not sure that was a bad thing for us in Tulsa.
Yesterday, Tesla reported second-quarter earnings falling by 23%, while their revenue declined by 12%. The TSLA stock sank more than nine percent, and with the $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicle purchasers going away on September 30 (a reduction which Musk himself once advocated for) via Trump’s recent July 4 tax bill, Musk told investors that Tesla “probably could have a few rough quarters.”
And regardless of the success or failure of Tesla as a company, there’s the legacy of DOGE, Musk’s hatchet job disguised as a spending cut. This includes the hollowing out of the National Park Services, the cutting of research on viruses, childhood deafness, and prostate cancer, and cuts to the National Weather System, which monitors for extreme weather. Musk’s idiotic scheme to downsize the federal government is costing lives, and people aren’t happy. Why would Tulsans want a business leader who’s so chaotic?
So, right now, I’m not terribly sad that Tulsa lost out on that Gigafactory. Hell, last year, Tesla laid off 2,688 employees from that factory, just as it announced that it planned to eliminate ten percent of its global workforce. Let’s count this loss as a win.