Elon Musk has denied a Wall Street Journal report that Tesla is in talks with Saudi Arabia to build an electric car factory in the kingdom.
In an X post, the Tesla CEO said: “Yet another completely false article from the WSJ,” without going into detail.
The Wall Street Journal wrote on Monday that Saudi Arabia and Tesla were in talks about the possible construction of an electric vehicle factory in Saudi Arabia. Citing unnamed sources, the WSJ report noted that the talks were at an early stage.
The report also noted that the outcome of the talks was highly uncertain due to “Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk’s contentious relationship with the Saudis” and the presence of Tesla’s rival Lucid Motors, which is majority-owned by the Saudi state.
Meanwhile, a day earlier, ZeroHedge reported that Musk had met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to discuss a Tesla factory. Turkish state news agency Anadolu confirmed the report and published pictures of the meeting, which took place in New York City.
Tesla has a goal of selling 20 million cars a year by 2030. To achieve this, it would need to double the number of factories it has, which currently stands at six. Musk said as much in August last year, sparking a flurry of speculation about where the next factories would be built.
The existing factories that make Teslas are located in the US – four of them – Germany and China. Earlier this year, Tesla began talks with the Indian government about a factory on the subcontinent.
Tesla had plans to set up shop in India last year, but scrapped those plans when the Modi government refused to lower import taxes on cars – which in some cases reach 100%, making Teslas unaffordable. The government’s idea was to encourage Tesla to make cars locally rather than importing them.
