Tesla becomes biggest auto employer in California
LOS ANGELES — As quietly as one of its electric cars, Tesla Motors Inc. has become the biggest auto-industry employer in California.
Tesla now employs more than 6,000 people in the state, the automaker said, offering the first public snapshot of its workforce this year.
That moves the fast-growing company well ahead of Toyota Motor Corp., the world’s biggest automaker, which has 5,300 direct employees in California — a count set to fall after the Japan-based company said it will move a majority of those jobs to Texas by 2017.
Tesla will add at least 500 more workers by year’s end in California, said spokesman Simon Sproule.
Led by billionaire chief executive officer Elon Musk, Tesla is the rare company doubling down on making products in California, which has relatively high labour and energy costs and stiff environmental guidelines for laying down new plants.
Tesla is already a bigger local employer than many high-growth California-based technology companies. At the end of 2013, according to an annual filing, Tesla had 5,800 employees worldwide — with about 90 per cent of those in California, Sproule said. Twitter Inc., according to recent filings, has 3,000 employees worldwide and Facebook Inc. has about 7,000.
The state’s biggest employers are government entities, including some University of California branches that employ tens of thousands of people each, while Nestle USA Inc. is among the top private job providers with 20,000 instate workers. Tesla’s sprawling factory in Fremont, near San Francisco Bay, has witnessed the booms and busts of California carmaking. Built by General Motors Corp. in 1962, the 5.5 million-square-foot plant once sent out hundreds of thousands of gasoline-burning Oldsmobiles, Buicks, Pontiacs and Chevrolets each year.
GM closed the site in 1982 and reopened it two years later in a joint venture with Toyota. Shortly after GM’s 2009 U.S.-backed bankruptcy shut the plant again, Tesla snapped it up for a modest $42 million US and retooled it to churn out electric cars.