Can Tom Zhu replicate Tesla's China success abroad?
Illustration by Luis Grañena
The most cited detail about Tom Zhu, the Tesla executive who runs the company’s China operations, is that he is extremely hard working — so much so that he slept at the company’s Shanghai Gigafactory during the Covid-19 lockdown to ensure that cars were still coming off the production line.
Zhu himself often references this; describing his team in China, he said, “We leave our families aside, and work day and night.” Nearly every person interviewed for this article also brough
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