Undocumented Workers Helped Build Elon Musk’s Tesla Gigafactory

Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news. Christy was in her early fifties when she left her native Honduras for the US. She told Bloomberg's Julia Love that she didn't have authorization to work in the US, but after a few months searching for work, she took a job as a cleaner on a construction site in Texas in twenty twenty one.

Texas is hot. This site was very exposed to the sun and the elements, especially in the early days, and she had to watch long distances. She was logging up to thirty thousand steps a day.

Christy is her first name. She asked that Bloomberg withhold her last name for fear of reprisal. She said she worked twelve hour shifts vacuuming, mopping floors, and scrubbing toilets in the summer heat. Be Amaskaline that the temperatures reached up to ninety eight degrees and even though there were water stations, she says her bosses discouraged workers from using them.

It will probably my superior. They discouraged that because they didn't want workers to lose time using the restroom, and so as a result, workers were struggling to stay properly hydrated.

One day, Christy was vacuuming a staircase to clear dust and debris. Or Christie says, the area wasn't ventilated, she was sweating heavily. The vacuums she'd been given had a short tube, so she was bending over to reach the ground. The last thing she remembers standing up and everything going darksas she woke up on a stretcher in a clinic nearby to the news that she had suffered heat stroke.

So sadly, these working conditions are common for undocumented workers in the United States. They are some of the most vulnerable workers in our economy. They faced greater risk if they speak out about dangerous workplace conditions, and so as a result, they often suffer more than other workers.

But there's one aspect of Christie's story that Julia says is unique.

What's noteworthy about her story is the owner of the construction project, Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla, who has really rose to political power over the past year with an anti immigrant message.

I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the big take from Bloomberg News Today. On the show, an investigation into how undocumented workers helped fuel the expansion of Tesla and SpaceX in Texas, while Elon Musk advocated for a crackdown at the border. One month into President Donald Trump's second term, Elon Musk has been busy aggressively shrinking the size of the federal government, targeting agencies like USAID and the Consumer

So he himself is an immigrant. He was born in South Africa, and The Washington Post has reported that in the early days of his career, when he was launching one of his first startups, he himself was working without authorization in the United States, and it was something that his investors were concerned about. Musk has denied this on X and through the years he's been a big advocate for visas for highly skilled workers, the H one B visa program. Tesla receives a lot of these visas for

Can you give us a sense of the kinds of things that Musk was posting on X about immigration and the lead up to the election. Yes.

So, here's an example from February of twenty twenty four. He wrote, illegals in a marriage had can get bank loans, mortgages, insurance, drivers' licenses, free healthcare California and New York and in state college tuition. What's the point of being a citizen if an illegal gets all the benefits but doesn't pay taxes or do

These are incendiary posts. Did he have any evidence to back these up?

There were cases in which he would highlight an isolated arrest of one migrant and kind of use that to paint a picture that immigrants are dangerous, are threat to public safety. There were other cases in which it is especially the assertions of voter importation, in which he had no evidence.

How has that shift tracked with his move towards alloying himself with President Trump.

Yeah, I think it's one of the issues where they really come together, and I think that he has framed it as one of the reasons why he felt like Biden should not remain in office, that President Biden did not have a handle on the border, you know, like many on the right, and like Trump himself, he framed the border as in a state of crisis and was stressing the need for change.

Even before Musk took a sharp turn towards the right, he had started to turn away from his longtime home base of California and started moving his companies to Texas. He broke ground on two major projects outside Austin, the Tesla gigafactory and a SpaceX facility. Can you give us a sense of the scale of the Tesla gigafactory he built there?

It's huge. It's about ten million square feet by some measures, it's the second largest building in the world. And it was a real challenge to find enough workers to build this project. Workers on the project have told me that staffing was constantly an issue.

This is where Christie worked, the cleaner you heard from at the top of the episode. She had been hired by a Teslas subcontractor after she fainted from heatstroke on the job. She says she had a dispute with her supervisor about the incident and was fired. Christi eventually filed a pair of complaints with OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, accusing the Tesla subcontractor of unsafe working conditions and retaliation She's being represented by the Worker's Defense Project,

In some cases, they showed me photos and videos that they took at the site, and in other cases they were accompanied by friends or family members who also echoed details of their stories.

What made you want to look into the citizenship status of these workers?

I thought it was interesting to explore whether must actions reflected this rhetoric. He's been urging the government to do more to vet the migrants that it lets in, and I was curious to know if he was scrutinizing his own operations on this front. And I think the construction sector is an intro testing one to consider it, because that labyrinth of contractors really does give owners a lot of plausible deniability.

Tesla and SpaceX didn't respond to interview requests or detailed questions for the story. Musk didn't respond to requests for comments sent to him and his lawyer prior to publication. Coming up, we'll look at how these undocumented workers came to be hired at Tesla and SpaceX construction sites and

I've been told that a project like this might easily take seven years to complete under normal construction timetables, and Tesla began limited production at the facility a little over a year after it began construction.

Wow, so that's much faster than it would typically take. Absolutely, and how did that play into their hiring decisions.

Well, in order to meet this ambitious timetable, Tesla needed a lot of workers, and I think that the way in which the construction industry operates meant that they did not necessarily have to inquire how their contractors were finding those workers.

Tesla didn't hire workers directly. They employed contractors, and those contractors employed subcontractors, and Julia says to source workers, these contractors coordinated with local affiliates of the plumbing, carpentry, and electrical unions, but they also used other tactics.

Tesla's contractors, I'm told hi labor brokers, which brought in workers from the Riodrand Valley, where workers often made less.

Not all the workers that were hired to work at the Tesla site had authorization to work in the United States, and Julia says these immigrants played a pivotal role in the construction of the gigafactory.

They worked as cleaners, plumbers, welders, roofers, pretty much any construction job that you can imagine.

And it wasn't just the Tesla site in Austin. One undocumented worker Julia spoke with helped build SpaceX's factory in Bastrop, Texas. The companies themselves and Elon Musk, the man who leads them, weren't directly involved in the contractors or their subcontractors hiring decisions, but Julia says there's more they could have done to enforce certain hiring standards.

I am told that Tesla did have some instructions that it communicated to its contractors. They stress to them the importance of checking for authorization to work, running red testing, things like that, but they did not monitor to ensure that their contractors were complying with their wishes, and I think this speaks to kind of a culture in the construction industry that that's the contractor's business, that it's up to the contractor to mine their own affairs.

Julia's sources told her that some of Tesla's top contractors did use e verify, a federal system employers can use to check work authorization, but Julia's sources identified some subcontractors that didn't use it. That's pretty typical for construction, but it's an option for companies who are concerned about the use of undocumented workers.

Builders can require that their subcontractors use e verify. That's often required up and down the chain of subcontractors on military projects and other sensitive projects. That's not typical of a project on a scale like Tesla's, where experts have told me it just wouldn't be wouldn't be practical.

According to the advocacy organization Workers Defense Project, the intensity of the work also created some unsafe working conditions. The organization spoke with about forty people who worked at the Tesla site and found that construction workers there grappled with a lack of personal protective gear and had to deal with extreme heat and a high injury rate. In twenty twenty one, a worker for a Tesla subcontractor died of

Most of the workers that I spoke with did not raise those types of issues. They did express concerns that they weren't being paid as much as their peers who were doing similar jobs as US citizens. That is a common issue in the industry, and Workers Defense found widespread claims of wage theft, which is where workers are not being paid fairly or aren't being paid what they were promised.

Sources told Julia that the proportion of undocumented workers at the Tesla site wasn't actually that extreme when compared to other Texas construction sites.

They said that this project was very typical, no better, no worse than the industry. The industry as a whole relies a lot on undocumented workers.

So why was it significant that these workers were undocumented and we're working on Tesla's gigafactory.

I think it's significant in that it's part of this pattern we have seen of people who are advocating hardline immigration policies not necessarily upholding those policies on their own projects, and so I see this story as the latest example of that.

There's this contradiction between Musk's public rhetoric on immigration and what's actually going on at his company's job sites. While Musk's posts on x cast undocumented immigrants as criminals, his businesses, like many others across the country, rely on their labor. Workers on the ground have noted the discrepancy too.

One worker told me he found himself asking why are we here if he doesn't want tests. But this worker ultimately concluded that must light so many other business people, was willing to tolerate the presence of these workers because he wanted cheap labor.

It's a fundamental tension that complicates Trump's broader immigration agenda.

Undocumented workers play a really pivotal role in sectors across our economy. If the US were to crack down at the border, the way. Donald Trump has expressed that he intends to. It would spell bid problems for construction, for agriculture, for manufacturing. And I think that the case of Tesla is just an interesting example of how companies all across our economy really rely on these workers.

Julia says it's unlikely that Tesla or SpaceX will see any wrecked ramifications for using undocumented laborers.

I think that one thing that is striking about our immigration system is there tends to be a lot of emphasis on pursuing individuals who violate the law by crossing the border without authorization. It's much less common to see enforcement actions against companies that employ undocumented workers.

This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. This episode was produced by David Fox. It was edited by Tracy Samuelson and Jeremy Keen. It was fact checked by audren A Tapia and mixed and sound designed by Alex Sugia. Special thanks to Angel Russio. Our senior producer is Naomi Shaven. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Our executive producer is Nicole Beamster. Bor Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's