Tesla’s headquarters will be relocated from Silicon Valley to Texas, informed Elon Musk
“I’m excited to announce that we’re moving our headquarters to Austin, Texas,” Elon Musk said at the company’s annual shareholders meeting.
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, announced to investors on Thursday that the company’s headquarters will be relocated from Silicon Valley to Texas, where it is building a plant.
“I’m excited to announce that we’re moving our headquarters to Austin, Texas,” Musk said at the company’s annual shareholders meeting.
“Just to be clear, though, we will be continuing to expand our activities in California.”
Tesla sales are increasing rapidly, according to Musk, and the company is increasing deliveries despite shortages of computer chips and other components.
Musk stated that Tesla intends to increase production at its Fremont, California, plant by 50 percent.
However, he claims that the plant has reached its limit in terms of how much more it can handle.
“When we first went in there it was it like a kid in his parents’ shoes; tiny us and this giant factory,” Musk said of the company’s first Silicon Valley plant.
“Now, its like a spam can. We are hitting the sides of the bowl.”
He noted that the cost of living in Silicon Valley is high for workers, with home prices out of reach for many, resulting in long commutes.
Musk has clashed with California regulators and is one of several high-profile tech figures who have left the state for places with lower income taxes and less regulation.
Winning through diversity
According to preliminary results, a stockholder-submitted proposal to have Tesla disclose more about the company’s diversity and inclusion efforts was approved, despite opposition from the board of directors.
It requests that comprehensive breakdowns of Tesla’s workforce by race and gender, as well as insights into how well efforts to improve diversity are performing, be routinely disclosed to investors.
“The business case for diversity is clear,” said Kimberly Stokes, vice president of Calvert Research and Management, who spoke on behalf of the proposal.
“As shareholders we are concerned that Tesla’s lack of focus on equity, diversity and inclusion could hinder the company’s ability to innovate in the future.”
Calvert’s winning proposal was one of four placed on the agenda by investors urging Tesla to improve worker rights and well-being.
A California jury this week ordered Tesla to pay a Black former employee $137 million in damages for allegedly turning a blind eye to racism at the company’s Silicon Valley auto plant.
“They awarded an amount that could be a wake-up call for American corporations,” said civil rights attorney Larry Organ, who represented the former Tesla employee.
“Don’t engage in racist conduct and don’t allow racist conduct to continue.”
According to the court filing, Owen Diaz was hired through a staffing agency as an elevator operator at the electric vehicle maker’s Fremont factory between June 2015 and July 2016, where he was subjected to racist abuse and a hostile work environment.
The plaintiff “encountered a scene straight from the Jim Crow era,” instead of a modern workplace, according to the suit.
Organ confirmed that a jury in federal court in San Francisco awarded Diaz $130 million in punitive damages and $6.9 million in emotional distress on Monday.
Human resources vice president Valerie Capers Workman downplayed the allegations of racist abuse in the lawsuit in a post, but admitted that Tesla “was not perfect” at the time Diaz worked there.
Workman emphasised that Tesla had changed since Diaz worked there, including the addition of a diversity team and an employee relations team devoted to investigating employee complaints.