Tesla’s first employee smile: Stefano Zhu at the Gigafactory in the Covid Lockdown and at TWTR
The appointment of Zhu to a global role came as Musk distracted himself with the acquisition of TWTR, and as his senior executive bench was urged to deepen to allow him to focus on the company.
Reuters reviewed the organizational chart that had been posted internally by Tesla and confirmed the change with two people who had seen it. They asked not to be named because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.
The Chinese media has been saying since December that they’re thinking of putting Zhu in a bigger role at the electric automaker.
In its fourth quarter report, the company said it delivered more than 400,000 vehicles, but it fell short of Wall Street estimates. The company delivered more than 300,000 vehicles in the same period a year ago.
People who work with him claim that during the Covidlockdown, he was one of the first workers to sleep in the factory.
A 10-minute drive from the Shanghai Gigafactory can be found an apartment that is subsidized by the government and that is managed by a buzz cut manager who likes to wear fleece jackets. It was not immediately clear whether he would move after his promotion.
He is in charge of the company’s main production hubs, at a time when the company prepares to launch Cybertruck and a revised version of its Model 3 sedan.
When Tesla posted a picture on Twitter last month to celebrate its Austin, Texas plant hitting a production milestone for its Model Y, Zhu was among hundreds of workers smiling on the factory floor.
Model-independent interview with Allan Wang, a Silicon Valley man with a Chinese-owned autonomous utility company and Tesla’s China boss
Allan Wang was promoted to Vice President in charge of sales in China in July and was the legal representative for the operation in registration papers filed with Chinese regulators.
Tesla board member James Murdoch said in November the company had recently identified a potential successor to Musk without naming the person. Murdoch didn’t reply to the request.
Zhu has made few public appearances since joining Tesla, and there is little public information about his age or personal life. He was born in China and CNN was not able to confirm if he still holds Chinese citizenship.
According to his profile, he obtained an masters degree in business administration from The Fuqua School of Business at Duke University and a bachelor’s degree from the Auckland University of Technology.
There was an interview with the Jiefang Daily in the Communist Party’s official newspaper in the financial hub, which showed a man working from an open office, with hardly any time to eat breakfast.
Tesla’s China boss does not embody a flashy lifestyle. He lives in a low-cost public rental home, paying a monthly rent of less than 2,000 yuan ($290), as it is close to the sprawling Shanghai factory.
Living close to work is “quite convenient,” Zhu said in the interview. He starts his job at 6 or 7 in the morning and usually stays past midnight.
The Shanghai factory after a massive typhoon flood in 2022: Delivery record of more than 100,000 vehicles in October of 2022
After a bunch of typhoons hit the plant, the employees manually drained the water from the buckets in the rain.
In August of 2022, Musk said that they had manufactured over three million cars, one million of which came from Shanghai. In November, the Shanghai factory set a fresh monthly delivery record of more than 100,000 vehicles. The plant was temporarily shut down last year due to Covid restrictions.