In a series of tweets responding to American president Joe Biden and Gene Simmons, the bassist-singer of rock band KISS, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been appealing to recognise that Tesla’s achievements and employee care are comparable to General Motors (GM) or Ford.
In a tweet on March 2, President Biden’s twitter account praised GM and Ford for investing a combined $18 billion to create 15,000 new jobs in the electric vehicle industry. In response, specifically to the person controlling the president’s twitter account, Musk said “Tesla has created over 50,000 US jobs building electric vehicles & is investing more than double GM + Ford combined.”
Gene Simmons retweeted Musk’s appeal, saying that perhaps Biden didn’t mention Tesla as they were a non-union company and they deserved praise. In response, Musk said that not only are Tesla employees the best compensated among their peers in the auto industry, but also that he would not stand in the way of unionisation if that’s what Tesla employees wanted.
Musk explained that this sentiment came from a belief that there are a lot of good opportunities for employees in the San Francisco and San Jose area. Therefore, while he says Tesla and other companies fight to offer them the best deals, his seemingly benign sentiment about unionisation is different from his past actions.
For example, in September 2019, a judge in California found Tesla’s management to be guilty of sabotaging unionisation efforts. Similarly, Musk himself has been asked to delete multiple tweets that can be seen as a threat to employees that want to unionise by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in America. Tesla is currently appealing that order.
To drive his point home about Tesla’s employees’ financial security, Musk even confirmed another tweet that claimed that their early employees have become millionaires because of their stock options.
