Tesla’s meteoric rise in share price and profile has seemingly hit a new layer of the stratosphere, as Bloomberg reports the company’s reported employee count tops that of California’s previous top auto employer, Toyota. And those figures include all of Toyota’s current Golden State employees—many of whom will soon be shipped off to Texas, strengthening Tesla’s dominance of the state’s auto sector.
The news further bolsters Tesla’s news-cycle prominence—see, we covered this story!—which of late has included the announcement of its Gigafactory and fluffy future forecast from Morgan Stanley. The revelation that Tesla now employs over 6000 Californians—with plans to hire 500 more this year—and beats out a juggernaut like Toyota, likely will further help Tesla put its direct sales issues and NHTSA investigations behind it. California has more than 400,000 workers in the auto industry—which includes dealers, factory workers, suppliers, and white-collar workers—but it still trails assembly-heavy states like Michigan (1.2 million), Ohio (850,000), and Indiana (515,000), among others, in terms of overall automotive workforce.
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This sunny news could also have the effect of enticing some talented Toyota workers who don’t wish to leave California into Tesla’s ranks as part of the forthcoming hires, although they’d likely still have to move, in this case from L.A. to the Palo Alto area. But given the ties—recently severed—between Tesla and Toyota that existed for the RAV4 EV project, hopping to Elon Musk’s company might be less of a leap than one might think. Tesla’s next launches include the Model X crossover and upcoming low-cost EV sedan.
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