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Tesla Giga Berlin employees bid farewell to ‘Mister Gigafactory’
Tesla employees that are working at the company’s Giga Berlin project in Germany are bidding farewell to Evan Horetsky, the company’s manager for the site.
Tesla reportedly relieved Giga Berlin Horetsky from his position on Thursday. The reasons for his dismissal are currently unknown.
However, last week, Tesla’s Global Supply Manager of Construction, Michaela Schmitz, was already saying her goodbyes to Horetsky. “it was my honor to work for and with you. We will finish it for you, Giga Meister. Take care!!” she said on one of Horetsky’s LinkedIn posts.
According to Rbb24, a German media site, people close to the Giga Berlin project stated that Horetsky was relieved of his duties. Some are speculating it is because of the water bill fiasco that took place last week.
However, Schmitz’s post was published on Horetsky’s LinkedIn before the water bill issue took place. This indicates that Horetsky may have been let go before the water was shut off at the construction site, and could be an indication of why the bill wasn’t paid.
Teslarati reported the rumors of a water shutoff at the Giga Berlin site. However, the water was still seen running normally, and the project never halted, local sources said.
I was at the GIGABERLIN at 17:00 pm
and could see that the cement mixing plant was still working and cement transporters were cleaned, WITH WATER.
it looks like the water is running.!!!! pic.twitter.com/LYLdHZ9g0Z— Gigafactory Berlin News (@Gf4Tesla) October 15, 2020
However, the report from Rbb24 says that the Strausberg Erkner water association did have a past due amount that went unpaid. Tesla paid the balance, and the water service was reactivated shortly after.
The site reported:
“Last week, the Strausberg Erkner Tesla water association had temporarily shut off the construction water because a payment deadline had expired. After the money was received, the water ran again.”
While the water bill was quickly taken care of because there appeared to be no interruption in Giga Berlin’s construction, the project manager’s responsibility would likely be to ensure that no possibility of interruptions could occur. This starts with the routine paying of bills that keep the site operating as usual.
If Horetsky was let go on early last week, there may have been nobody to handle paying the bill, which could be the reason as to why the water was shut off at the site temporarily.
Interestingly, Horetsky has supervised other Tesla projects, including the completion of Tesla Gigafactory 1 in Sparks, Nevada, and the initial construction phases of Giga Shanghai in China. Horetsky also oversaw the Fremont plant’s preparations for vehicle production. It is possible that Horesky could be assisting with other Tesla projects, as Giga Texas is also in its construction stages.
During Tesla’s Q3 Earnings Call on Wednesday, October 21st, the company outlined the timeline for Giga Berlin’s first phases of production, which are expected to begin in Summer 2021.
The company said in its Update Letter:
“Construction of the Gigafactory in Berlin continues to progress rapidly. Buildings are under construction, and equipment move-in will start over the coming weeks. At the same time, the Giga Berlin team continues to grow. Production is expected to start in 2021.”
According to Tesla’s Senior VP of Powertrain and Energy Engineering Drew Baglino, Giga Berlin’s initial ramp will require assistance from its pilot 4680 battery cell production line in Fremont.
Tesla’s pilot 4680 battery cell line in CA will support Giga Berlin’s initial ramp
“We will incorporate 4680 design solutions into many applications in time across both energy and vehicle, and we can use our pilot production facility in Fremont to support the new factory in Berlin as it ramps,” Baglino said.
Tesla will introduce the Model Y to Giga Berlin’s production lines initially but plans to manufacture other vehicles at the German plant in the future.
Elon Musk
Ford CEO Farley says Tesla is not who to look at for EV expertise
Interestingly, Farley has been one of the most hellbent CEOs in terms of a legacy automaker standpoint to push the EV effort. It did not go according to plan, as Ford took a $19.5 billion charge and retreated from its EV push in late 2025.
Ford CEO Jim Farley said in a recent podcast interview that Tesla is not who Americans should look at to beat Chinese carmakers.
The comments have sparked quite a bit of outrage from Tesla fans on X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk.
Farley said that Chinese automakers are better examples of how to beat competitors. He said (via the Rapid Response Podcast):
“If you’re an American and you want us to beat the Chinese in the car business, you’re all going to want to pay attention, not necessarily to Tesla. Nothing against Tesla—they’ve been doing great—but they really don’t have an updated vehicle. The best in the business for us, cost-wise and competition-wise, supply chain, manufacturing expertise, and the I.P. in the vehicle, was really BYD. In this next cycle of EV customers in the U.S., they want pickups and utilities and all these different body styles. But they want them at $30,000, not $50,000. Like the first inning, they want them affordably.”
Despite Farley’s synopsis, it is worth mentioning that Tesla had the best-selling passenger vehicle in the world last year, and in China in March, as the Model Y continued its global dominance over other vehicles.
Musk responded to Farley’s comments by stating:
“This is before Supervised FSD is approved in China. Limiting factor is production output in Shanghai.”
This is before supervised FSD is approved in China. Limiting factor is production output in Shanghai.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 19, 2026
Interestingly, Farley has been one of the most hellbent CEOs in terms of a legacy automaker standpoint to push the EV effort. It did not go according to plan, as Ford took a $19.5 billion charge and retreated from its EV push in late 2025.
Ford cancels all-electric F-150 Lightning, announces $19.5 billion in charges
Instead, Ford is “doubling down on its affordable” EVs and said it would pivot from its previous plans.
Reaction from Tesla fans was pretty much how you would expect. Many said they have lost a lot of respect for Farley after his comments; others believe he is the last CEO anyone should be taking advice on EVs from.
Nevertheless, Farley’s plans are bold and brash; many consider Tesla the most ideal company to replicate EV efforts from. It will be interesting to see if Ford can rebound from this big adjustment, and hopefully, Farley’s plans to replicate efforts from BYD work out the way he hopes.
Elon Musk
SpaceX wins its first MARS contract but it comes with a catch
NASA awarded SpaceX a $175 million Mars rover contract while the White House proposes cutting the mission.
NASA just signed a $175.7 million contract with SpaceX to launch a Mars rover that the White House is simultaneously trying to defund. The contract, awarded on April 16, 2026, tasks SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy with launching the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Rosalind Franklin rover from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, no earlier than late 2028. It would mark the first time SpaceX has ever sent a payload to Mars.
Under NASA’s Rosalind Franklin Support and Augmentation project, known as ROSA, the agency is providing braking engines for the rover’s descent stage, radioisotope heater units that use decaying plutonium to keep the rover warm on the Martian surface, additional electronics, and a mass spectrometer instrument, as noted by SpaceNews.
Those nuclear heating units are the reason an American rocket was required at all. U.S. export controls on radioisotope technology mean any payload carrying them must launch on a domestic vehicle, which narrowed the field to SpaceX and United Launch Alliance. Falcon Heavy’s pricing made it the practical choice.
SpaceX is quietly becoming the U.S. Military’s only reliable rocket
Falcon Heavy debuted in February 2018 and has 11 launches to its record. The rocket has not flown since October 2024, when it sent NASA’s Europa Clipper toward Jupiter. The three-core design, built from modified Falcon 9 first stages, gives it the lift capacity needed for deep space planetary missions that a single Falcon 9 cannot reach.
The Rosalind Franklin rover has been sitting in storage in Europe for years. It was originally due to launch in 2022 as a joint mission with Russia, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine ended that partnership, leaving the rover built but stranded without a launch vehicle or landing hardware. NASA stepped back in through a 2024 agreement with ESA to rescue the mission. The rover is designed to drill up to two meters below the Martian surface in search of evidence of past life, a science objective no previous mission has attempted at that depth.
The contradiction at the center of this story is hard to ignore. The White House’s fiscal year 2027 budget proposal included no funding for ROSA and did not mention the mission at all in the detailed congressional justification document released April 3.
Musk has long argued that reaching Mars is not optional. “We don’t want to be one of those single planet species, we want to be a multi-planet species.” Whether this particular mission survives Washington’s budget fight, the Falcon Heavy contract means SpaceX is now formally on record as the rocket that could get humanity’s next Mars science mission off the ground.
The timing of this contract carries extra weight given that SpaceX filed confidentially with the SEC in early April and is targeting an IPO roadshow in the week of June 8. It would be the largest public offering in history.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) is set to hold its Earnings Call for the first quarter of 2026 on Wednesday, and there are a lot of interesting things that are swirling around in terms of speculation from investors.
With the company’s executives, including CEO Elon Musk, answering a handful of questions that investors submit through the Say platform, fans want to know a lot of things about a lot of things.
These five questions come from Retail Investors, who are normal, everyday shareholders:
- When will we have the Optimus v3 reveal? When will Optimus production start, since we ended the Model S and Model X production earlier than mid-year? What’s the expected Optimus production rate exiting this year? What are the initial targeted skills?
- What milestones are you targeting for unsupervised FSD and Robotaxi expansion beyond Austin this year, and how will that drive recurring revenue?
- How will Hardware 3 cars reach Unsupervised Full Self-Driving?
- When do you expect Unsupervised Full Self-Driving to reach customer cars?
- When will Robotaxi expand past its current limited rollout?
Additionally, these are currently the three questions that are slated to be answered by Institutional Firms, which also answer a handful of questions during the call:
- Now that FSD has been approved in the Netherlands and is expected to launch across Europe this summer, can you discuss your Robotaxi strategy for the region?
- What enabled you to finish the AI5 tapeout early and were there any changes to the original vision? Last week, Elon said AI5 will go into Optimus and the Supercomputer, but one month ago said it would go into the Robotaxi. Has AI5 been dropped from the vehicle roadmap?
- Given the recent NHTSA incident filings, can you update us on the Robotaxi safety data? If safety validation remains the primary bottleneck, why not deploy thousands of vehicles to accelerate the removal of the safety driver?
The questions range through every current Tesla project, including FSD expansion and Optimus. However, many of the answers we will get will likely be repetitive answers we’ve heard in the past.
This is especially pertinent when the questions about when Unsupervised FSD will reach customer cars: we know Musk will say that it will happen this year. Is Tesla capable of that? Maybe. But a more transparent answer that is more revealing of a true timeline would be appreciated.
Hardware 3 owners are anxiously awaiting the arrival of FSD v14 Lite, which was promised to them last year for a release sometime this year.
The Earnings Call is set to take place on Wednesday at market close.
Ford CEO Farley says Tesla is not who to look at for EV expertise
SpaceX wins its first MARS contract but it comes with a catch
