Tesla Inc. asserted late Saturday that restarting its operations in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic didn’t make the company an outlier, nor was it going against the grain.
The claim belied the events of the preceding 12 hours. Tesla sued the county that has blocked its car plant from reopening with Elon Musk calling the local health officer -- a former infectious diseases professor with a master’s degree in public health -- “unelected & ignorant." The chief executive officer threatened to move Tesla’s headquarters out of California, warning that all its manufacturing may leave the state, too.
It was a flare-up without precedent in the three months since the first confirmed Covid-19 death in the U.S. -- a resident of Santa Clara