Alongside the curves of the Colorado River, surrounded by flatlands and scrub, Tesla’s Gigafactory sprawls over 2,500 acres outside Austin, Texas. From the air it looks like a landing pad for aliens. Capital letters hundreds of feet tall spell out tesla in white across the roof, big enough to see from the window of a passing airplane. Opened in 2022, the factory itself hunkers down low. It’s not a campus, like the California headquarters of Google or Apple. The Gigafactory is a single, enormous building, a walled fortress as big as a cattle ranch.
For Elon Musk and his backers in the state capitol the Gigafactory is much more than a place to make cars. The complex’s enormous assembly floor, with its shiny red robots and twenty thousand employees, sends a Texas-sized message to entrepreneurs everywhere: the future won’t be built in California or New York. It will be built in the Bible Belt, by men—always men—with the willpower to tame the forces of technology, wrestle profit from the land, and create new industries out of whole cloth. It will rise up like the oil derricks of a hundred years before and give evidence of the limitless, God-given natural bounty of the region. It will make some men rich and when it does, it will provide evidence that the land still breeds heroes like Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett, defenders of the Alamo.
