Chương 129: Chapter 128: The Rejection of The Parking Lot (07/18/2000)

DATE: Tuesday, July 18, 2000 LOCATION: Storey County, Nevada | The Gigafactory Site (Project Diamond) LOCAL TIME: 11: 00 AM PST The desert wind whipped across the graded dirt pad. It was staggering—the footprint of a building that would eventually cover 5. 3 million square feet. Elon Musk stood next to me, wearing a hard hat and holding a roll of blueprints. He was arguing with the foreman about the HVAC ducting.

"It needs to be a closed loop!" Elon shouted over the wind.

"We can't vent the conditioned air. It's pure entropy!" He turned to me, buzzing with that specific manufacturing anxiety.

"If we don't get the cell production density up to 300 watt-hours per kilogram, the robots will be too heavy," Elon said.

"The physics of the battery pack are dictating the chassis." Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

"Relax, Elon," I said, looking out at the sprawling foundation pour.

"It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to work." Elon blinked.

"Excuse me? First principles. If it's not perfect, it's wrong."

"This isn't the final form," I said. I pointed to the dirt.

"This factory? It's a sandbox. It's a prototype. We are building it here because we have air to breathe and gravity to hold the machines down. But this isn't where the future lives." I turned him toward the sky, where the moon hung visible as a pale ghost in the daylight.

"The gravity on the Moon is one-sixth of Earth. The vacuum is absolute. The purity of the silicon wafers we can print there... it makes this place look like a mud hut."

"I know," Elon said.

"But we have to build the bridge first. We need the assembly line."

"We need the robots," I corrected.

"But we don't need the workers here. That's the mistake of the 20th century. Herding people into a box to weld things is obsolete. It wastes fuel. It wastes time. It separates fathers from their children." I clapped him on the shoulder.

"Build the bots here, Elon. But don't build a parking lot for the employees. They aren't coming to the factory."