Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times threw some hard questions in the direction of General Motors CEO Mary Barra during her interview session at the 2021 Dealbook online summit.
Just recently, Mary Barra was praised by President Joe Biden for allegedly leading the electric vehicle revolution. While the entire world knows who started the EV movement — the CEO of Tesla, Elon Reeve Musk.
American car manufacturer General Motors is the main beneficiary of the Build Back Better bill, a part of which gives a max $12,500 tax credit to new EV buyers. The full reimbursement is only available to the unionized electric carmakers — and GM is unionized and Tesla is not.
When Andrew reminded Mary Barra that there will be a bigger tax incentive for vehicles made by her company compared to non-unionized Tesla and Toyota, “Is that fair?” he asked, “Well, the new legislation coming, I think what really important to do is to level the playing field,” Mary replied. Since both Tesla and GM have already delivered 200,000 EVs, the $7,500 tax credit is gone for both companies.
The customers of new EV companies like Rivian and Lucid can claim the full $7,500 tax credit. A legislation that is based on a company being unionized or not, GM is going to be a bigger beneficiary of the tax incentive, thus being able to attract more customers.
Even though Tesla is not unionized, Tesla employees make much more money compared to people working at GM. Because Tesla employees are also given a share in the company’s stock after one year in addition to other benefits.
Just like President Biden, Mary Barra seemed very reluctant to acknowledge Tesla’s role and leadership in bringing electric vehicles to the mainstream. Our Twitter follower and Tesla influencer Sawyer Merritt posted the most interesting part of this conversation, let’s listen to it first.
“This is true. Also, Tesla employees get health insurance, stock & other benefits,” Tesla’s Elon Musk replied to the above tweet and video.
“You’ve spent a lot of time with this administration. They’ve had a number of meetings around EVs — Tesla has not been invited to those meetings. Do you know why that is? Do you sit there and say this is a little strange given the role that they’ve (Tesla) played,” Andrew Sorkin said to Mary Barra during the interview.
President Biden and GM CEO Mary Barra ignoring Tesla as the leader of the global EV market seems to be part of the narrative they are trying to build, to establish General Motors as the main electric vehicle player in the US market at least.
Time magazine also featured Mary Barra on the cover of this year’s May 10 – 17 issue. “General Motors CEO Mary Barra is engineering a greener future,” the title of the cover states. Time magazine totally forgot who Elon Musk was at the time. The magazine also featured the Hummer EV which is still in the prototype stage and thousands of Chevy Bolt EVs have been recalled for battery fire issues.
Seeing this, the Tesla Community has started feeling that this is all part of an orchestrated campaign to create the public image of General Motors as the EV market leader.
This situation quickly escalated into a Twitter trend #MaryBarra and a sea of memes started to flow through the social media platform. In this day and age of information, how can be one so ignorant that you can easily build a false narrative when the facts are so clearly visible to the entire world — of course, the only one with a very low IQ score.
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