hey @elonmusk since you are all about improving american manufacturing, why not produce Dojo chips using an american semiconductor foundry like @intel?
Litquidity is underselling it. This tweet accelerated the timeline on one of the largest corporate relocations in American history.
When Gonzalez tweeted this on May 9, 2020, Tesla’s market cap was roughly $150B. Today it’s $1.5T. She was a state assemblywoman representing a San Diego district with zero Tesla operations, zero connection to Alameda County’s factory dispute, and zero to gain from picking this fight. Musk responded with two words: “message received.”
Eighteen months later, Tesla moved its headquarters to Austin. Gonzalez, meanwhile, resigned from the Assembly in January 2022 to run the California Labor Federation. Her husband Nathan Fletcher later resigned from the San Diego County Board of Supervisors amid sexual harassment lawsuits. The political dynasty she was building collapsed. The company she told to leave became a $1.5 trillion titan operating from Texas.
The math on this is staggering. California lost Tesla’s HQ, its future gigafactory investments, and the tax revenue and job creation that followed. Austin got all of it. One assemblywoman with 34,000 Twitter followers picked a fight with a CEO who had 34 million, and the state’s own governor publicly sided with Musk over her the following Monday.
What makes this actually interesting is why she did it. Gonzalez authored AB5, California’s anti-freelance law that destroyed tens of thousands of independent contractor livelihoods to benefit her union donors. The Musk tweet was brand-building for the same constituency. Tag the world’s richest man, generate headlines, fuel a run for Secretary of State. She even admitted it: “I probably could’ve expressed my frustration in a less aggressive way. Of course, no one would’ve cared if I tweeted that.”
She optimized for attention from labor unions. Musk optimized for shareholder value and regulatory environment. Only one of those optimization functions scales. Gonzalez got a union leadership job. California lost a trillion-dollar company.