Tesla News: Austin Approves Tax Cuts for Cybertruck Terafactory

The saga continues in the long Austin, Texas versus Tulsa, Oklahoma battle to win over the next Tesla factory. One moment it seemed like the land had been bought in Austin, then Elon Musk visited Tulsa over July 3rd and said the land purchase wasn’t a done deal.

Now, we have a vote from the Travis County Commissioner’s Court, which was unanimous with only one member abstaining. It decided to approve a 10-year $14 million tax break for the factory, if it’s build on the 2,100 acre site in southeast Austin, by the Austin-Bergstrom Airport.

Tesla also applied for some substantial tax breaks from the local Del Valle school district, which also voted to give Tesla a massive $50 million lowering of their taxes over the next 10 years.

In the Commissioner’s court, time was of the essence. One board member asked for a week delay, which was met by frustration from other members, who were worried Tulsa would win Tesla over.

We had a call with the governor of another state and mayor of another town just yesterday to go through a whole bunch of things, similar to what we’re going through right now, so I can’t say much more than that. We have to make a decision early because these things take a long time and there’s a lot that we have to put in place. There’s a lot of money that we have to get allocated in the right ways. – Rohan Patel, Tesla’s senior global director of public policy

If Tesla decides on the Austin location for the Cybertruck factory, it will spend $5 million on the sand/gravel mining land, and then invest $1.1 billion into the construction. When it’s all said and done, there would be a several million square foot factory with about 5,000 workers employed there.