Elon Musk has reportedly tapped Tesla China’s top executive Tom Zhu to help run and optimize Gigafactory Texas. Tom Zhu’s name was mentioned in a Bloomberg report which claimed he had been flown in from China to help oversee the Texas Giga upgrade.
“We can’t know for sure which rumor is true, it could be both, but we tend to believe the latter. Maybe related to credibility because Tesla’s old executives also oversaw the construction of Giga Shanghai,” wrote the insideevs page on Thursday, December 8, 2022.
Tom Zhu is reportedly in Austin this week. He also brought in some of his engineering team from China to help oversee the Giga Texas, for production of the Tesla Model Y and Cybertruck. It’s unclear how long Tom Zhu will be in Austin.
Tom Zhu joined Tesla in 2014 to help build the company’s Supercharger network and most recently led the automaker’s Asia Pacific operations. The Tesla factory in China is known as Tesla’s biggest export hub and recently doubled annual capacity to around 1 million vehicles.
Tesla is currently trying to simultaneously ramp up production at its newest plants in Texas and Berlin. The company confirmed in October that Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg was reaching a production rate of 2,000 vehicles per week, but did not provide Gigafactory Texas updates.
The last update for Austin was back in June, when Tesla confirmed a weekly production rate of 1,000 vehicles. The company initially plans to manufacture the Model Y SUV in Texas powered by the new, larger 4680 lithium-ion cell. However, switched to using the older 2170 cells as the new battery is not ready for volume production.
Rumors of Tom Zhu becoming Tesla’s CEO emerged as Elon Musk is busy working on his latest acquisition of the company, social media giant Twitter. Moreover, the billionaire entrepreneur is also the CEO of SpaceX and tunneling company The Boring Company, as well as the founder of brain-chip developer Neuralink.
