White House Labor Secretary Visits Tesla’s Texas Factory with Elon Musk

Elon Musk with Marty Walsh; Image credit: Axios

The White House administration is starting to seek deeper ties with Tesla, it appears.

According to Axios, Tesla CEO Elon Musk gave Labor Secretary Marty Walsh a tour of the company’s Gigafactory in Austin, Texas, on Sunday. The meeting took place during the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival, which is ongoing from March 11-20.

Tesla plans to hold a grand opening on April 7 for Giga Texas, also now the headquarters of the company.

“I’m told the 75-minute conversation at 1 Tesla Road included inflation, American innovation and, of course, job creation in Texas,” reported Mike Allen for Axios.

Axios said “Musk said he wants to keep the conversation going,” while Walsh spoke today at SXSW at 11:30am CT, at the Hilton Austin Downtown. Walsh chatted with Politico’s Daniel Lippman, in a panel named, “A Conversation with Labor Secretary Marty Walsh on the State of the American Workforce.”

Back on March 5, Walsh told Yahoo Finance he was “willing to have a conversation” with Musk about “anything he would like to talk about,” and now it looks like that chat has materialized.