Chapter 113

Musk decides to build Tesla's next Gigafactory in Austin rather than other candidate cities, and the facility rapidly grows into one of the world's largest factories by floor area. The chapter also details Musk's push to revolutionize car manufacturing through gigantic die-casting machines that can produce entire vehicle underbodies in seconds rather than from hundreds of individual welded parts.

In early 2020, Musk and Tesla executives play a game identifying ideal cities for a new Gigafactory, eliminating California due to NIMBYism and regulations, and other candidates like Tulsa, Nashville, and Dallas. While sitting at Cape Canaveral before SpaceX's first crewed launch in May 2020, Musk texts Omead Afshar asking whether he'd prefer Tulsa or Austin, then immediately decides on Austin and assigns Afshar to run it. By July 2021, after just one year of construction, Giga Texas reaches ten million square feet—twice Fremont's size and 50 percent larger than the Pentagon. During a factory walkthrough, Musk scrutinizes details obsessively: questioning the necessity of floor-to-ceiling glass panes, pushing back on coolant flow limits at a steel-cooling station, and demanding the cooling cycle complete in under 60 seconds. The chapter then shifts to explain Musk's vision for gigapresses, sparked in late 2018 when he played with a toy Model S and noticed its underbody was die-cast as a single piece. Rejecting engineers' objections that no machines exist to cast full-size car underbodies, Musk pushes the team to commission custom machines from Idra Presse in Italy. The resulting 6,000-ton (and later 9,000-ton) machines can injection-mold an entire chassis in eighty seconds—replacing a process that previously required over a hundred separate parts to be welded, riveted, or bonded, which produced gaps, rattles, and leaks. Musk draws manufacturing inspiration from the toy industry, praising its speed, cheapness, and precision, and emphasizes that precision is achievable through care rather than expense.