In an aerial view, Tesla Corporate Headquarters are seen on January 03, 2023 in Travis County, Texas.
Brandon Bell | Getty Images
Tesla just kicked off its 2023 annual shareholders meeting at its Austin, Texas factory, on Tuesday with shareholders voting to add former Tesla CTO JB Straubel, who is now the CEO of Redwood Materials, to the automaker’s board of directors.
Redwood Materials recycles electronic waste and batteries, and last year struck a multi-billion dollar deal with Tesla supplier Panasonic.
After the shareholder vote, CEO Elon Musk kicked off his portion of the meeting with a commitment to conduct a third-party audit of Tesla’s cobalt supply chain, namely to ensure there is no child labor within any of Tesla’s cobalt suppliers.
Cobalt is a critical ingredient for production of batteries that go into Tesla’s electric cars and backup battery packs used at homes and for utility-scale energy projects. “Even for the small amount of cobalt that we do us, we will make sure six weeks til Sunday that no child labor is being exploited,” Musk said to the cheers of investors in attendance in person.
Musk also said that he expects a challenging economic environment to persist for the next twelve months, and that many companies will go bankrupt. But after that, he believes, the economy will recover and Tesla will be well-positioned. He also predicted that the Tesla Model Y would be “the number one best-selling car on Earth this year.”
Musk also announced that Tesla plans to produce a new kind of drive unit, which he said will require less silicon carbide than prior drive trains, and no rare earth elements. He added that Tesla will also switch to a new, low voltage architecture in its cars which should require the use of less copper.
Since the electric vehicle maker’s last annual meeting in August 2022, Tesla’s largest retail shareholder, Leo Koguan, has criticized Musk for selling billions of dollars worth of his Tesla holdings to finance a $44 billion buyout of…
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