I wonder how much their lack of union plays into this. The auto factories fled Flint/Detroit due to the UAW basically an attempt to limit the scope of strikes and violence from the UAW. Tesla doesn't have to worry about unions (at least yet), and so they have very centralized factories where an enormous amount of work is done. Probably makes it easier to do everything in the US if you can do it all in one building
> The auto factories fled Flint/Detroit due to the UAW basically an attempt to limit the scope of strikes and violence from the UAW.
That is the story the auto companies like to tell, to make unions look damaging to workers and communities. From what I've read, the migration had a lot to do with race. But regardless, do either of us have any evidence to share? (not me right now)
The race riots didn't help, but they were largely secondary to the factories leaving. The UAW would never strike at their factory; they would usually go across the street and strike at some significant, shared plant (like an engine factory for multiple vehicles). For a long time, logistic constraints prevented major auto companies from moving too far away, but once they figured it out they started putting each factory in a new, usually right-to-work state, so you could only strike at your factory. Flint went from being the home of GM and having ~14 major auto factories to 3. Similar story for Detroit.
Similar things happened in most major industries. The other one I'm familiar with is GE Locomotive, who moved their engine facility to Grove City (which still never unionized), and now has a major facility in Fort Worth as well.
There are several issues of how racism interacted with manufacturing.
One is that the auto manufacturers wouldn't hire black people into serious jobs - for a long time, all they could be was janitors, etc. I read one account that they went to local black leaders for recommendations and one person had a graduate degree - CPA or MBA, iirc. They got a dead-end clerical job or something like that.
Union workers were often actively hostile, even when union leadership welcomed them. Multiple times they walked out when one black person was hired.
Also, local racism crushed the black community, which would be the workforce. Redlining effectively prevented black people from living outside certain neighborhoods and prevented them from getting loans. They ended up packed into these neighborhoods, subject to white slumlords who charged exhorbident rents. Schools were awful. With little education, no money, no access to credit, and even if you overcame all that, no opportunity for career. Don't forget police brutality, race riots against blacks everywhere, lynchings in the South, etc.
In the long run, unions can be blamed for this whole Trump Presidency.
Biden was pressured by unions to snub Tesla at the EV summit. This personally offended Elon, who then went to support Trump with all sorts of tactics including buying Twitter to amplify his voice.
Is Citizen's United the only thing that allowed one person to donate $150 million? This is the obvious flaw. We would need a RICO type framework to identify the basket of vectors that one person/organization can use to funnel money to a candidate. This is a bipartisan issue but I don't know how we can surface the narrative so more people can talk about it.
I think you are confusing Citizens United v FEC (2010) with Buckley v. Valeo (1976). (CU is largely “corporations are people applies in the application of Buckley”.)
Though, also, neither decision impacts limitations on donations to candidates, both address limitations on expenditures (in Buckley’s case by non-candidate persons independent of campaigns, by candidates from personal funds, and by candidates in aggregate; CU mostly deals with the first of those where the legal person is a corporation and not a natural person.)
I agree that allowing elections to be influenced by spending money was a mistake. Campaign spending is way out of control and it reduces our leaders and politicians into desperately begging for donations.
Citizens United has no impact on what an individual can do with his money. It’s purely about corporate spending by entities like IBM, the Sierra Club, or the New York Times Company.
I think there was a lot of pressure on Tesla/Elon to donate and participate more, and higher ups turned pretty hard on him when he didn't. They were pulling the tax credit from Tesla while holding EV summits with everyone but him. I don't think he was being reactionary, I think his hand was forced.
Further he really isn't a conservative. He's still running around on X talking about how we need to double the number of H1-B's and other social-left causes. Cutting spending through DOGE is something every Republican has talked about for decades, and I don't think it's a major flip for him to want to do that.
I don't think H1-Bs are really a "social-left cause". They're something that big tech companies like because they get to cherry-pick skilled workers and keep them locked in. On the main political spectrum, I think they're pretty centrist. The right dislikes them because they're immigration in disguise, the left dislikes them because they're indentured servitude in disguise.
He's incredibly conservative. He very much likes the idea of Neo-feudalism. You have a class that owns everything (of which he's the prime example right now) and then you have a class that labors to rent things from people like him. Those who don't - or can't - play that game are simply not fit to survive.
It's a school of thought so old that we barely recognize it anymore, but that's what he wants to return to. Lots of tech bros are into it.
The democrats also tried to pass legislation in 2021 that excludes Tesla from an EV credit due to it being not built by unions, even though Tesla has by far the largest share of electric vehicles and is the most productive and innovative company in this sector.
Yeah because they were anti union. It wasn't because of any personal dislike of Elon.
And it was inevitable that the more mainstream automakers would sell more evs then Tesla as EVs became a larger and larger share of cars sold. Granted it's taking longer than expected but Tesla is no longer the majority even if it's overall has a large plurality but falling pretty fast
For guys like that, being pro-union is personal dislike.
They see themselves as the smartest, strongest, most clever people in history. They don't need some group moderating their plans, much less one made of people they hired. Any suggestion to the contrary is a strike against the natural order that they perceive reality through.
