Overview
- Speaking at the New York Times DealBook Summit, Mary Barra said she privately told President Joe Biden that “a lot of that credit goes to Elon and Tesla.”
- Tesla and Elon Musk were not invited to the May 2021 White House EV meeting, after which Biden praised GM and Barra as leaders during remarks at GM’s Factory Zero in Detroit.
- Musk criticized the administration that December, noting Tesla’s roughly 300,000 deliveries in Q4 2021 compared with GM’s 26 in the same quarter.
- Kamala Harris later wrote that leaving the biggest EV player out of the meeting was a mistake, adding weight to accounts of the episode’s significance.
- Reporting ties the snub to a long-running split between Biden and Musk, and Barra’s new comment renews attention without any reported reconciliation or policy shift.