Invoice Farley and Elon Musk
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DETROIT – Ford Motor CEO Jim Farley and Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk will host a dwell, audio dialogue by way of Twitter Areas about accelerating EV adoption at 5:30 p.m. ET on Thursday, in keeping with a post from Farley.
The web dialogue between rivals comes as Ford makes an attempt to ramp up manufacturing of its totally electrical autos in an try and catch up to — or someday surpass — Tesla’s sales within the section.
Whereas Tesla nonetheless dominates the EV sector by far, Ford got here in second in totally electrical automobile gross sales within the U.S. final 12 months, notching gross sales of 61,575 electrical autos.
The Twitter Areas occasion will mark the most recent interplay between the 2 executives, who’ve a novel rivalry. They’ve every expressed admiration for the opposite, regardless of their corporations competing straight.
Musk, who leads Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter, has repeatedly praised Ford as a historic American firm, lauding its capacity to keep away from chapter, not like its crosstown rivals General Motors and Chrysler in the course of the Nice Recession.
And whereas other automakers paused their advert spending on Twitter when Elon Musk took over the social media firm final 12 months, Ford stayed energetic on the platform. Farley has personally typically engaged his followers and followers on Twitter, too.
Farley has additionally praised Tesla for its EV management below Musk whereas trying to emulate a lot of its successes.
Ford notably beat Tesla to the pickup section starting manufacturing of its F-150 Lightning, the electrical model of its constantly well-liked vehicles, in April 2022. Ford additionally closely benchmarked the Tesla Mannequin Y for its Mustang Mach-E crossover and adopted Tesla in value cuts of the electrical crossovers.
The timing of the Tesla and Ford leaders’ dialogue is probably going shocking to many. It comes a day after huge technical glitches on Twitter Spaces interfered with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis asserting his presidential marketing campaign there.
It will not be the primary time a Tesla competitor has talked with or requested Musk to talk with them. In 2021, then-Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess invited Musk to name in to an inner convention with executives of the German automaker to speak innovation.
