Musk Groundbreaking For Tesla’s China Factory

Elon Musk joined the mayor of Shanghai on Monday for the groundbreaking ceremony of Tesla’s first factory outside the U.S. and in the world’s largest electric vehicle (EV) market, China.

Musk had trekked to these inhospitable outskirts of Shanghai on a rainy Monday to break ground on Tesla Inc.’s first car-production site outside the U.S. And in typical Musk fashion, he was big on promises and can-do attitude, flanked by a phalanx of Chinese officials who are keen backers of Tesla’s beachhead in China, the world’s largest automobile market.

The build-up to the event was vintage Musk: a rapid-fire string of tweets bubbling with excitement, a dose of star power (his on-again, off-again girlfriend, the rapper Grimes, accompanied him on his China trip), and an aggressive timetable even for China’s standards, where centralized planning isn’t foreign to the concept of moonshot construction projects. Tesla wants the factory to start pumping out Model 3 cars by the end of the year.