The Texan Ideology

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.