Shanghai Government Opens Arms To Tesla

Shanghai government officials may or may not be involved in Elon Musk’s plans to take Tesla private, but they are certainly welcoming the Silicon Valley company to China with open arms. This weekend, we’ve come across a video of their comments regarding Tesla’s Chinese gigafactory.

The location for the planned gigafactory is “Lingang,” according to our friend Vincent on Twitter. Lingang is a planned city that is now apparently called Nanhui New City (since April 2012). This location is a bit infamous as a ghost city, but all a ghost city really needs is a bunch of humans — the ghosts leave as the humans come in. Apparently, in this case, a large number of humans will be building Tesla electric vehicles and battery packs in the young city.

Vincent shared that there’s a video of government officials saying the plan is to put the gigafactory into production as soon as possible.

Vincent adds that local Chinese banks are vying for the opportunity to finance the Chinese gigafactory and Tesla is already recruiting for the factory, news we’ve already gathered from Tesla but is worth further confirmation nonetheless. But perhaps my favorite comment of all from Vincent is the opening tweet here:

As far as I can tell, there is no update on the specific timeline for this project. It appears that the key point is that officials and local banks are moving as quickly as possible to break ground on the gigafactory. We will update this article if we find out more information quickly.

With news of Tesla potentially going private, and with CEO Elon Musk’s apparent happiness with the long-term vision of some Chinese leaders, I keep coming back to the following two tweets from Musk while he was in China last month:

With my team after a profoundly interesting discussion of history, philosophy & luck with Vice President Wang in 中南海紫光阁 pic.twitter.com/pHd52YTZD2

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 12, 2018

Hmm, makes you wonder.

This article has been updated to correct for timing of the video and remove unnecessary commentary.