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Elon Musk hints at buying closed GM factories

Elon Musk hints at buying closed GM factories

Such a move would be symbolic yet unlikely due to the UAW's foothold in the region.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has expressed interest in buying General Motors factories that will soon be shut down.

GM recently announced plans to lay off around 14,000 workers and idle five North American factories, including assembly plants in Michigan and Ohio.

"It's possible that we would be interested," he said in an interview with 60 Minutes. "If they were going to sell a plant or not use it that we would take it over."

Tesla already occupies a former GM-Toyota factory in Fremont, California. The assembly plants in Michigan and Ohio are unlikely candidates for serious consideration, as the United Auto Workers is well established in Midwest factories.

Musk has been extremely critical of the UAW, last year saying the union "dropped Fremont like a hot potato to protect their core base in Detroit." The UAW has been accused of orchestrating a negative media campaign against Tesla to re-unionize the Fremont factory."

"There's been an aggressive campaign by the UAW to absolutely attack Tesla with a load of nonsense ... in order to try to unionize the company," Musk reiterated in the 60 Minutes interview.

Staying out of the UAW's home turf was likely a significant contributing factory in foreign automakers' tendency to build assembly plants in the anti-union South rather than the Midwest in recent decades.