As the United Auto Workers (UAW) union continues attempts to ratify new contract agreements with Big Three automakers General Motors (GM), Ford and Stellantis, one GM plant in Michigan has narrowly voted against the recently proposed deal following a historic six-week strike.
GM secured a tentative deal with the UAW late last month after Ford and Stellantis had come to tentative agreements within the prior week. The strike-ending agreements followed the initial walkouts against all three automakers on September 14 after previous union contracts expired and multiple waves of strike escalations in the weeks in between.
Since coming to the tentative agreements, the UAW is going to local chapters to explain the deals and have them ratified by workers through a vote. On Thursday, UAW Local 598 workers at GM’s Flint, Michigan assembly plant said they narrowly voted against adopting the contract, with 51.8 percent of votes cast going against the proposal, according to Reuters.
GM’s Flint assembly plant has 4,746 employees, and the factory produces the Chevy Silverado truck. GM did not comment on the process of ratification.
While GM is scheduled to continue holding votes on the contracts with additional local chapters, the news highlights the fact that the contracts are not yet a done deal — even following the costly strikes and lengthy negotiation period.
Workers at major GM plants including its Arlington, Texas assembly plant and its Fort Wayne, Indiana truck factory will vote in the weeks ahead. According to one UAW vote tracker, roughly 58 percent of GM workers across facilities who have cast votes so far have voted in favor of ratifying the contract.
UAW’s efforts to unionize Tesla ‘absolutely’ supported by President Joe Biden
The proposed UAW agreement would cover around 46,000 GM workers, including 25 percent in base wage increases through the contract’s April 2028 deadline, along with the automaker gradually increasing the top wage by as much as 33 percent. In addition, the proposal includes cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) that boost total worker pay to more than $42 per hour.
Despite the rejection of the contract at the Flint facility, some say GM is unlikely to offer much more than what it has already offered. University of Michigan professor Erik Gordon thinks chances are low for GM to go much higher.
“The chances of GM putting more than another 15 cents on the table are low,” Gordon said.
GM’s tentative contract includes almost $2 billion in investments going toward electric vehicle (EV) development at plants in Michigan, Kansas and New York. Late last month, GM also announced the delay of a key EV plant in Tennessee, and the company has separately announced plans to slow some other EV investments.
A major sticking point during early rounds of negotiations with the Big Three included adding coverage to future EV battery and auto plants, though the automakers eventually gave in.
The news also follows a nightmarish month for GM, even beyond the strikes.
GM’s self-driving subsidiary Cruise had a driverless vehicle drag and pin a woman in San Francisco in early October, for which the company’s driverless permit from the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) was immediately revoked. It has since been reported that GM will halt production of Cruise’s self-driving Origin van, and the company is currently reviewing its response process following the accident.
Watch below to see UAW President Shawn Fain’s Wednesday ratification update.
What are your thoughts? Let me know at zach@teslarati.com, find me on X at @zacharyvisconti, or send your tips to us at tips@teslarati.com.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s next Uranium in Uranus merch is Boring Company’s weirdest tease yet
Elon Musk teased a glowing new Boring Company merch idea, complete with a Geiger counter.
Elon Musk teased the next piece of Boring Company merchandise on X Saturday, and it is exactly as unserious as fans of the company’s product history have come to expect. “The next @boringcompany merch will put Uranium in Uranus,” Musk wrote in a thread posted early Saturday morning. He followed up by explaining that the item would glow in the dark, “because otherwise how could you find it,” and that a Geiger counter would be sold separately as “an optional strap-on.”
Musk closed the thread with a line that doubles as a mission statement for the tunneling company’s merchandise arm: “It’s not easy coming up with something that is both outrageously unsellable and yet extremely popular.”
The Boring Company has built a small but consistent side business out of novelty items that start as jokes and end up selling out. The company’s Not-a-Flamethrower raised roughly $10 million in a few days back in 2018, moving all 20,000 units it produced. Its Burnt Hair perfume, priced around $100 a bottle, sold out fast enough that scalpers were flipping units on eBay for ten times the retail price. Boring Bricks, made from tunneling spoil, followed the same playbook of teasing a product on X months before it became real.
Musk has not said what the actual item will be, only that it involves uranium and glows in the dark. Given the pattern, that vagueness is probably intentional. Past merch announcements have started as one-line jokes and taken weeks or months to turn into an actual product listing on the company’s site, and there is no guarantee this one follows through at all.
The timing lines up with a period of real momentum for the Boring Company outside of the joke merchandise. The company said last week it plans to double the number of operational stations on its Vegas Loop by the end of the year, a target tied to a hiring push for drivers and operations managers. Prufrock-5, one of the company’s tunnel boring machines, also just wrapped a test tunnel in Bastrop, Texas, and is expected to relaunch on its next assignment in November.
Whether the uranium joke turns into an actual product remains to be seen. Musk’s post did not include a price, a shipping date, or even a name for the item, which has historically meant a Boring Company website page goes up quietly, password protected, sometime before an announcement.
News
NASA taps SpaceX for more astronaut missions as Boeing Starliner remains grounded
NASA just gave SpaceX a $946 million contract for three more astronaut missions through 2030.
NASA has awarded SpaceX a $946 million contract modification covering three more astronaut missions to the International Space Station, according to an announcement the agency published Friday. The award adds Crew-15, Crew-16, and Crew-17 to SpaceX’s existing Commercial Crew Transportation Capability contract, bringing the agreement’s total value to $5.92 billion across 17 flights.
SpaceX confirmed the award on X, writing that it was excited for Falcon 9 and Dragon to launch NASA’s Crew-15, 16, and 17 missions to the Space Station from Florida. The new missions cover ground, launch, in orbit, and return operations, along with cargo transport and a lifeboat capability while docked at the station, and the period of performance runs through 2030.
We’re excited for Falcon 9 and Dragon to launch @NASA’s Crew-15, 16, and 17 missions to the @Space_Station from Florida https://t.co/Qm16vVK9F3 pic.twitter.com/drg3s7GtuM
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 18, 2026
The award follows a notice of intent NASA issued in May, when the agency first signaled it would purchase up to six additional post certification missions from SpaceX. Teslarati covered that filing at the time, noting NASA cited technical issues and schedule delays encountered by Boeing as a driving factor. Friday’s contract modification locks in three of those six missions, with the remaining three left open for NASA to award later, potentially to Boeing if Starliner clears certification.
Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner has still not flown an operational crew rotation mission for NASA. The spacecraft’s most recent crewed test flight in 2024 ended without the astronauts returning aboard Starliner, and the company has spent the time since working through thruster problems. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said this week that SpaceX is not retiring Crew Dragon today, for sure, while stopping short of committing to fly it past 2030.
Crew-12 is currently docked at the space station, and NASA has said Crew-13 is targeting a launch in the coming weeks. The newly awarded Crew-15 through Crew-17 missions extend SpaceX’s role as NASA’s primary way of getting astronauts to and from orbit well into the back half of the decade, regardless of what happens with Starliner or Starship in the meantime.
Investor's Corner
New drone video shows Tesla’s Optimus Factory reaching a turning point
New drone footage shows Tesla’s dedicated Optimus factory steel frame nearing completion at Giga Texas.
Tesla’s dedicated Optimus factory at Gigafactory Texas is closing in on a finished steel frame, according to drone footage posted Thursday afternoon by longtime site observer Joe Tegtmeyer. In the video, Tegtmeyer said structural steel assembly is now about five column grids away from reaching the building’s north perimeter beam, putting the primary skeleton in its final stretch roughly six months after Tesla broke ground on the North Campus site in late March.
The Giga Texas Optimus Factory latest update … construction keeps moving fast!
Steel assembly is now only about 5 column grids from the north perimeter beam. Concrete is going in on the three upper floors, rebar is still being laid for more pours, and footing / grade-beam work… pic.twitter.com/qvFPvwnYzW
— Joe Tegtmeyer 🚀 🤠🛸😎 (@JoeTegtmeyer) September 17, 2026
Tegtmeyer’s footage shows concrete already going in on three upper floors while crews continue laying rebar and pouring grade beam footings at ground level. That kind of parallel work, steel rising at one end of the site while concrete sets at the other, is a scheduling approach Tesla used at the original Giga Texas building and appears to be repeating here to save time before the plant’s targeted 2027 production start.
Teslarati has tracked the building’s progress since Tesla confirmed construction was officially underway in May, when the first steel structure went up on what was then bare, reclaimed land. The facility is part of a more than 5.2 million square foot expansion of Giga Texas’s North Campus that Tesla has said will eventually run nearly the length of the existing vehicle factory, over 4,000 feet, while sitting somewhat narrower. Musk has pegged the long term output target at 10 million Optimus units a year once the line is running at full capacity, a volume that would dwarf the one million unit pilot line Tesla is standing up separately at its Fremont, California factory.
Tesla Giga Texas to feature massive Optimus V4 production line
The Texas facility sits alongside another major buildout on the same campus. Terafab, the joint Tesla and SpaceX chip fabrication plant that will eventually supply the silicon running Optimus units in the field. Housing robot assembly and chip production on the same grounds is a deliberate supply chain decision, cutting down on the shipping and lead time that would otherwise sit between the two.
Tesla has not given an updated timeline beyond its previously stated goal of bringing high volume Optimus production online at the site in the summer of 2027. Fremont’s smaller pilot line began mass producing the current Gen 3 robot in January, with that plant expected to build tens of thousands of units this year primarily to generate the real world data Tesla needs to refine the robot’s software before Giga Texas ramps up. Six months of visible construction progress, tracked almost entirely through Tegtmeyer’s recurring drone flights, gives the clearest outside look yet at how seriously Tesla is treating that 2027 deadline.
Elon Musk’s next Uranium in Uranus merch is Boring Company’s weirdest tease yet
NASA taps SpaceX for more astronaut missions as Boeing Starliner remains grounded
