Sometimes it’s what a President doesn’t say that speaks the loudest.
In particular, the absence of Elon Musk and his Tesla cars at the May 2021 White House EV summit turned out to be a consequential snubbing.
When asked at the time what she thought about the episode, GM CEO Mary Barra said she hadn’t given a lot of thought to the snub, even as her company was heaped with praise for leading the EV revolution.
Speaking Wednesday at the New York Times Dealbook Summit, she told interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin that she had a private conversation with then-President Joe Biden to set the record straight.
“He was crediting me and I said, ‘Actually, I think a lot of that credit goes to Elon and Tesla,'” Barra said. “You know me, Andrew. I don’t want to take credit for things.”
The Tesla snubbing episode contributed to a massive rift between Biden, who credited labor unions like the United Auto Workers for his recent electoral victory, and Musk, who later campaigned for Trump and served as a key advisor to the White House earlier this year.
Musk made no secret of his anger at GM getting credit at Tesla’s expense.
“Let’s not forget the White House giving Tesla the cold shoulder, excluding us from the EV summit and crediting GM with ‘leading the electric car revolution’ in the same quarter that they delivered 26 electric cars (not a typo) and Tesla delivered 300 thousand,” he wrote in a December 2021 post on X.
Even Biden’s Vice President and later Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris later said it was a “mistake” not to extend an invitation to the billionaire businessman.
“If you are convening the nation’s manufacturers of electric vehicles and the biggest player in the field is not there, it simply doesn’t make sense,” she wrote in her book about the 2024 campaign. “Musk never forgave it.”
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