In the last decade, Mr. Musk has created nearly 35,000 jobs among his various enterprises — and most of those jobs are classic manufacturing ones. His Tesla Gigafactory, a 5.5-million-square-foot battery factory under construction outside Reno, Nev., is expected to employ 6,500 people in manufacturing jobs by 2020.
After the factory is complete, 95 percent of the parts contained in Tesla vehicles will be made in the United States. His company’s leading-edge advances have pushed the entire auto industry to innovate, with rivals seeking to copy many of Tesla’s best features.
This is the future of manufacturing — much more so than the 1,000 jobs saved at the Carrier plant in Indiana last week.
And Tesla’s challenges are a microcosm of the trade issues that confound so many American manufacturers: To sell its cars in China, Tesla faces tariffs and other disincentives that make its vehicles 40 percent more expensive than locally produced electric cars, according to Mr. Musk. If you flip it around, China faces only a nominal tax to sell electric cars and parts in the United States. The situation is fairly similar in much of Europe.
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