U.S. President Donald Trump has so far not made any public statements about Tesla – however, in December 2019, he is said to have personally prevented an extension of US electric car funding, from which Tesla would have benefited the most as the market leader. But now Trump spoke in an interview very positively about Tesla and Elon Musk as CEO of the company and about his second large company SpaceX.
Musk was “one of our great geniuses and we have to protect our geniuses,” Trump said on the fringes of the World Economic Forum in Davos in an interview with CNBC, a financial broadcaster. The moderator had previously asked him if he had anything to say about Musk after Tesla was now worth more on the stock market than GM and Ford together. Trump put Musk in line with inventor Thomas Edison and “all those people who invented lightbulbs, the wheel, and all that stuff.”
He only recently spoke to the Tesla CEO, Trump said. Musk has also had great success with rockets, for which he deserves recognition – “I have never seen the engines without wings, without everything come down and just land,” said the US President about the work of Musk at his rocket company SpaceX , which is increasingly engaged in technical exchange with Tesla.
On the subject of Tesla, Trump said he was worried about Musk and the company in between, but the CEO did a good job and quickly got “terrifyingly” far. A year ago, there was talk of the end of Tesla in public, now it’s suddenly “about these great things”.
With Tesla, Musk will build a large factory in the United States, Trump even announced. Then he hesitated briefly and corrected himself indirectly: “He has to do that. Because we help him, so he has to help us too, ”said the President, without explaining what the help from the government is. Tesla currently has its parent plant in Fremont, California, and a battery factory with Panasonic in the state of Nevada, as well as smaller sites in the United States. So far, nothing is known of plans to build another Gigafactory in Tesla’s homeland.
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