Today, Explained - Elongate

Episode Date: May 18, 2020

Elon Musk fought the law and Elon won. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. Elon Musk has been in the news a bunch lately, partly because he and his baby mama Grimes named their kid after what looks like an equation for time travel, but also because he's been challenging stay-at-home orders and not challenging them in like a Michigan protester kind of way. He's been challenging them along with the full heft of his Tesla factory in California. It's a story we really wanted to cover last week, but we had all this other stuff to do. Luckily for us, Vox's Reset podcast exists to look at this pandemic's biggest tech story. So if you didn't hear their episode about Elon, we're going to rebroadcast it today on our show. If you haven't already, go subscribe to Reset. Here's their episode from last Thursday. One of the world's most influential businessmen is taking on the

government over its coronavirus lockdown. After railing for weeks against California's restrictions on manufacturing, Elon Musk restarted production at his California plant on Monday, tweeting, quote, I will be on the line with PayPal has some strong feelings about the stay-at-home orders around the country, especially those in Alameda County, California. Musk has been tweeting that he thinks that these are unconstitutional orders and that they're fascist. But he's also just really unhappy that Tesla's car factory in Fremont, California has been shut down for a bunch of weeks now. And therefore, the company is not making any money.

Last weekend, Tesla sued Alameda County and violated lockdown orders by resuming production. I mean, it's been stunning to watch. A standoff, really. And then? So Alameda County is saying that Tesla can resume its operations next week, which had already started this week. Yeah, it's a bit confusing, but they apparently came to an agreement last night where Tesla can resume its operations. Today on the show, we're going to explain how this whole mess unfolded. And we'll take a look at why Elon Musk objects so strongly to the coronavirus lockdowns. Plus, we'll explain how this follows a long line of questions about Tesla

and worker safety. I'm Arielle Zimross. This is Reset. Sean O'Kane is a senior transportation reporter for The Verge. On Monday, he broke the news that Tesla had started making cars again in its Fremont plant in California. So I asked him to catch me up on what's going on. So, Sean, to be clear, Tesla violated the rules of the county before the county said it could resume production. Technically, Tesla isn't supposed to start making cars until next week, right? Yes, and Elon Musk even admitted that in a tweet on Monday, saying that we're reopening the factory in violation of the public health order. And he asked that if anybody is going to get arrested, please let it be him and only him,

because he said he was going to be there at the factory this week on the line alongside his workers. I'm really glad that you brought up that tweet because I have so many questions about that specific tweet. Welcome to my world. He said he was going to be working on the line with the other workers and that he should be the only person arrested, right? So I want to ask you some questions about this. Does Elon Musk actually ever work the car assembly line? He has gone onto the factory floor at a number of Tesla's different factories, a bunch in the past. He sort of notoriously went on the factory line at this Fremont, California factory in 2018, when the company was really struggling to ramp up production

of the Model 3, its first mass market electric car. I know two people within 10 or 15 minutes after he tweeted that on Monday, two current workers at Fremont both sort of independently told me the exact same thing, which is that when he says that he's not going on the line to work, he is just going to stand there and sort of stare at people until they feel awkward and then he'll eventually walk away. Okay. And it kind of sounds like he's basically inviting the authorities to arrest him. Why would he do that? I do think he probably thinks he'd be better off if he's the only one arrested as opposed

to his workers. But I do think part of this is the sort of like peacocking aspect of it, where he knows that this county has been on its back foot a lot in this whole back and forth over the last couple of weeks. I think he sees value in pushing their buttons a little bit and propping up the valor of it so that he can look a little bit better in the eyes of his workers and people who are supporting his effort to reopen the factory. How many cars have been made at the Tesla factory since it

reopened and violated a bunch of rules from the county? Workers there told me that over the weekend, they made a couple hundred, probably around 200 or so, which is certainly lower than the normal amount that they would make over a couple day stretch. But they were still slowly sort of bringing those workers back in and getting things back up to speed. So, Sean, not long before the news broke that Tesla's Fremont factory had unlawfully decided to continue production, the company filed a lawsuit against Alameda County, right? Can you tell me what's going on with that lawsuit?

So back in the middle of March, Alameda County put in their stay-at-home order. They, along with all the other counties in the Bay Area, were basically the first to do this in the country. And they only were going to allow essential businesses to keep operating. And they defined what those essential businesses were, and auto manufacturing wasn't part of that. Two days later, the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, issued a statewide stay-at-home order. And instead of specifically listing out and defining in the state's own terms what an essential business is, they punted those definitions to these guidelines that have already been written up by the Department of Homeland Security. And in that set of guidelines,

auto manufacturing is considered national critical infrastructure. So it's basically like Tesla's way of saying, hey, the state said that we're an essential business and we should be able to keep manufacturing cars here in California, whereas the county didn't actually allow that. That's sort of the broad strokes argument. It's a really otherwise spicy lawsuit, I would say. Really? What do you mean by that? Yeah, I mean, I read a lot of legal documents, so anything with any bit of color is always going to feel a little spicy. Here's a good line.

Alameda County's power grab not only defies the governor's order, but offends the federal and California constitutions. And then it goes on to describe a couple of ways that Tesla believes that it does offend the federal and California constitutions. And then it goes on to describe a couple of ways that Tesla believes that it does offend the federal and California constitutions. That doesn't really sound like legal language. Yeah, I mean, I think that's why I described it as spicy. They go through and they actually do point out specific statutes that they think were wrongly cited in the county's order and everything, but all of those are teed up with really,

I would say uncharacteristically for most other lawsuits, flavorful language. Well, at least they're making it interesting for you in your reporting process. Do you think that that's actually a good argument to say that the state says cars are essential and we should be able to make them. And so Alameda County, you guys better step off. Does that make sense?

On a technical level, it could be the right argument to make. You know, I think it's a little strange that California just sort of rested on these other guidelines that had been issued by DHS that were originally issued years ago. So it wasn't even really something that was specifically drawn up for the pandemic. I think in a situation like this, it's worth really zooming out to the really, really kind of heady philosophical question of just whether or not we think this stuff is essential. Tesla employs something like 20,000 people in California. So it's certainly a big employer. It's a very big exporter because it sells a lot of the cars that it makes in California to Europe and China. It's could have about whether or not those are essential right now against what risks the workers are being sort of exposed to by going in and having to make cars. Because that's a process that involves a lot of close contact, a lot of close quarters working for these factory employees. And, you know, there's a reason why when back in March,

all of these stay-at-home orders started to hit, all of the other automakers in the United States shut down. Okay. And are any of those car companies making this argument? No. Although I would love to read a really spicy lawsuit spearheaded by, you know, Jim Hackett, the CEO of Ford. Okay, so Sean, it looks like next week Elon will be able to make cars and be in the clear as he does so. But why did Elon take this kind of legal action in the first place? I mean, I think the simple answer is just he wants to be making cars again. Tesla really relies on its ability to get as many cars out the door every day, every week, every month so that it can make money. And the company is actually in sort of a better financial position than it has been in a very long time or maybe ever.

It's turned back to back to back quarterly profits and has something like $8 billion in cash in the bank. But that can all evaporate pretty quickly when you're talking about auto manufacturing, because it's just such a capital intensive thing to do. Like it just costs so much money to operate a factory like this one in California. And so every day that they don't have cars coming out of the factory, they're getting closer to losing money. In one of his tweets announcing the lawsuit over the weekend, Musk basically said that he's going to move the California factory to another state. It was almost like a threat. Is it important to him to keep a factory in California? Yeah, I mean, it's important because it would cost a lot of money to move Tesla's operations

to a different place. And not only money, it would cost them a lot of time, which is sort of running counter to the problem that they face right now, right? If they try to move their operations, they're gonna be not manufacturing cars for a lot longer than the stay-at-home order. And Tesla and California have a sort of unique relationship anyways,

where it's basically like the only automaker in the state. It's one that California holds really highly as an example of business in the state because it's a clean energy company. It's a big employer. It's a big generator of revenue and a big exporter. So, you know, I think the reason we saw Musk tweet that is that he knows how valuable the company is to not only California's economy, but its image as sort of a leader in the sort of push for a greener world. But it would leave them with the only other place where they make cars right now is the new Gigafactory in China that they just completed a couple months ago.

So they would be left with only one other place in the world where they'd be making cars. Generally speaking, how has Elon Musk reacted to this coronavirus and the lockdown orders and the shelter in place orders? Not well, I think is a favorable way to put it. He spent much of March really, really aggressively underplaying the threat of the coronavirus, saying that by end of April, he thinks that there would be no or close to zero new cases in the United States and saying in an email to SpaceX employees that they were at more risk of a car crash than dying of COVID-19, even though car crashes aren't contagious. And so that was sort of bad enough. And then he really, over the last couple of weeks, started going off on these stay-at-home orders, calling them unconstitutional, saying that they're fascist. He has said a couple of different things to support that, saying that it's a violation of our freedom to assemble. He said that it's, you know, something that goes against everything that made this country great. It's a very similar rhetoric to what we've heard from the president. So he went from, you know, basically peddling coronavirus misinformation

to being one of the most vocal supporters of this sort of fringe pushback against these stay-at-home orders that we've seen from some of the all-right people that have been protesting, and unfortunately from the president. Considering that Elon Musk generally claims to be on the side of science, I mean, he's the founder of SpaceX, is this whole episode and his reaction to this pandemic surprising? I do think it's surprising in the sense that, especially on the things that he's been demonstrably wrong about, you know, whether that's when he was sort of pushing hydroxychloroquine or when he was talking about sort of the case numbers and how he thought they would drop, you'd think that like someone being that much of a sort of self-professed fan of science and

the scientific method that he would be willing to sort of admit when he was wrong. Because it's like what science is all about, right? It's like trying to test a thesis and then like accepting when you're wrong and moving in a different direction or like learning from that and to be fair he does that a lot with his companies in some senses like especially spacex he is far more willing with spacex to admit when there have been problems like they've been testing this mars rocket prototype and it's blown up a couple times and like he's been like really upfront about that and like shown his work and like tried to explain to people like what value there is in learning from these sort of, you know, what could be looked at as missteps. But like when it comes to the coronavirus stuff, he's not willing to admit any of that at all, which is like, that's what's surprising to me. After the break, we'll take a deeper look at how Tesla's employees have been reacting to this whole situation.

And we'll talk about Musk's worker safety track record. This is Reset. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash ramp.com explained r a m p.com explained cards

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Sean O'Kane, Senior transportation reporter for The Verge. Has Tesla done anything to make sure that workers are safe in the Fremont factory? They released a relatively detailed plan on Saturday that lays out a bunch of methods that they're going to try and employ at the factory. Temperature checks. They're going to hand out personal protective equipment, trying to enforce social distancing to, you know, as best as you can in an automotive

factory. They're also staggering work schedules and sort of break schedules at the factory to try and help keep people from pooling in one area as much as they might have in previous years. But whether or not that's all going into effect according to the plan that Tesla laid out is not super clear. Some of the workers that I've talked to have said that, you know, people were social distancing and they're enforcing social distancing on the shuttle rides to the factory, on the line to get in and get their temperature checked and everything. But once they're inside the factory, it's like kind of a free for all. Elon Musk doesn't seem super worried about potentially putting his employees at risk by opening his factory. Why is that? What's up with

that? You know, Tesla just opened this new factory in China a couple of months ago, and they're building cars there too. And that they actually had to shut that down in early February, which was part of like a wider shutdown of manufacturing as China tried to slow the spread of the coronavirus. And when they got things back up and running there, they had instituted a whole bunch of protections to make sure that they, you know, best mitigated any further spread of the virus as they got back to work. You can take what it's done in China and apply that to the factory here in the U.S. and make sure that workers are protected and they're doing as much as they can to stop the spread while still getting back to work and doing what they think is an essential business.

Okay, and what do Tesla workers think of all this? What have they been saying about, you know, working conditions and the closure? It's hit or miss based on the ones that I've talked to, you know, like a couple have been excited to go back to work just because they need the money and they don't really think that the risk is really there. One of them is saying, I need to go in because I need to be able to put food on my family's table. But like a couple of them are really worried about it because, you know, while the company has probably learned a lot with the factory in China and reopening and putting in these protective measures, labor laws in China are much different than they are here. And the sort of how you approach treating your workers

there versus here is different. And just the work that they do building these cars is in a lot of parts of the process, just naturally very close quarters and involves a lot of touching of surfaces. Sometimes you're talking about working in really hot environments. So adding a mask into the situation, you know, introduces potentially new risks. And so that's certainly had some of the employees that I've talked to worried saying, luckily, I can afford to not do it for a little while. And so I'm not going to go in, I'm going to use my paid time off and stay home. Because I don't want to go in and be touching a bunch of the same surfaces that co workers are touching and potentially catch this virus. Are any of his workers mad at him for this?

One or two of them, especially. They went from people who really believed in the mission of the company to one of them even said, like, when he threatened to move out of the state, they basically said, like, great, like, I wouldn't have to deal with this anymore. And I wouldn't have to deal with like him and his ego because they feel that like, that's what's just driving everything ahead of worker safety, ahead of everything else. Historically, does this follow along with how Tesla has dealt with its workers and worker safety?

Does this make sense to you? What's important to keep in mind in the background of all of this is that the company has had problems with worker safety in the past, like well-documented problems as well at multiple facilities. There has been a lot of really good reporting about just injuries at some of the workplaces that Tesla runs. Not only that, but the company's reaction to the reporting on these workplace safety issues has not been great. It's brought out some of Elon Musk's most angry assaults on the press in the past. And then there's also been specific cases like the Gigafactory in Nevada, for example, where some people started getting injured a couple

years ago to the point that OSHA wanted to come in and like check out what was going on. They had had a couple of reports of similar injuries. And so they wanted to make sure there wasn't a pattern emerging. And the Reno Gazette Journal recently reported all about how Tesla went really far out of its way to sort of stymie OSHA from just coming in and like checking that things were OK. They turned the inspector away at the gate, didn't even let him come up to the factory. When he came back with a warrant, they turned him away, and they were eventually able to sort of like stop OSHA from coming through the door, even with a warrant, which is really wild.

What does Elon's reaction to this coronavirus and the closures say about his relationship to the state and federal government? I mean, Tesla has really always had a sort of interesting relationship closures say about his relationship to the state and federal government? I mean, Tesla has really always had a sort of interesting relationship with all sorts of governments as a company because he runs businesses that in some ways rely on governments, whether it's because they need approvals to get factories completed or they need tax credits. Tesla wouldn't really exist if it hadn't been for this Department of Energy loan that Tesla was able to get a bunch of years ago that funded them to the tune of a couple hundred million dollars

at a time when they really needed money. SpaceX wouldn't exist if it hadn't been for a bunch of government contracts. And so there's been this sort of reliance on the government in a lot of ways, but he's also more willing to push back against those government entities than most other people. And I think this is a really heightened example of that. Elon is an important figure in tech, and he's not alone. There are others like him. So

what should this tell us about the power of folks in tech when it comes to big government decisions like this? Personally, it's a little disheartening because I've been in awe of this sort of collective effort to fight against this pandemic. And it's one thing when like someone like Elon Musk, and it's often Elon Musk is sort of out there saying these things that go against the grain, but for him to go and try to specifically spur action in this case in a way that seems counterproductive and seems risky, seems like a bad example, at the very least is devaluing this sort of collective effort that we've all been part of. it's tough to see that from someone who is looked up to by a lot of people. And, you know, in a lot of respects, really does deserve credit for the things that he's done in trying to make the world a better place, clean up one of the dirtiest sectors of industry on our planet. And so it's just like really conflicting.

But if we've learned anything about Silicon Valley over the years, it's that the people who have pushed it forward the most are always looking to try and find another edge. And so I wouldn't put it past a lot of the other people in those various industries that make up Silicon Valley to try to look to this as an example of maybe how they'd be able to do it themselves. Whether or not they have the sort of like braggadocio and like confidence that Elon Musk has to be able to pull it off is like a totally different question and I don't think most of them do so it would almost be fun in that respect to try and watch them do it so I guess we're just gonna have to keep paying attention to what he's doing for better or for worse.

As someone who follows Elon Musk far too closely for his own personal health, I would love to be able to walk away from it from time to time. But yeah, he makes it harder and harder pretty much every week. Sean O'Kane is a senior transportation reporter at The Verge. Sean, thank you. Thank you. We reached out to Tesla for comment. The company didn. Sean, thank you. Thank you. We reached out to Tesla for comment. The company didn't respond by our deadline. I'm Arielle Zimross, and this is Reset. We publish episodes three times a week, on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays.

So if you haven't already, subscribe to the pod. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or in your favorite podcast app. And if you like what you hear, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. It really helps other people find the show. If you want to get in touch with me, you can find me on Twitter. I'm at ADRS. You can also reach the Reset team by emailing reset at Vox.com.