Elon Musk threw a 9,000-person rave at Tesla’s Berlin factory

By Alma Fabiani

Published Oct 15, 2021 at 12:11 PM

Reading time: 1 minute

Email Facebook WhatsApp X Flipboard

Copy Link

Image by Wendy Wei from Pexels

Back in March 2020, Tesla CEO Elon Musk suggested an alternative to Coachella, a “mega rave cave” under Tesla’s Berlin Gigafactory. Musk tweeted a poll on whether the event should take place before adding that the party should have “an epic sound system & woofers the size of a car.” A whopping 90.2 per cent answered ‘yes’ to the promise of a Musk-produced party and about 18 months later, they were blessed with the ‘GigaFest’.

The event took place on 9 October, and welcomed almost 9,000 visitors to the new German Tesla grounds—the Tesla Giga Berlin. “DJs including Boris Brejcha performed alongside food trucks, ‘street art’, and a ferris wheel, while Tesla coils were synced up to produce voltage sparks in time to the beat of the music,” Dazed wrote about GigaFest. And the publication wasn’t joking—Tesla coils did in fact sync up to the beat of the music… That being said, whether the event can truly be qualified as a “mega rave” is up for debate.

Musk himself went on stage to welcome the ravers in broken German and stated that he hoped the first cars assembled at the factory would be delivered by December. Construction on the Berlin factory had briefly been sidetracked by hibernating snakes—no joke—but it is expected to produce about 500,000 Tesla cars a year (so long as Germany’s Environment Ministry gives Musk the green light to start production at the site).

The company has also submitted plans to invest €5 billion (about £4.2 billion) in a battery plant with 50GWh capacity next to the site, outstripping Volkswagen’s planned 40GWh capacity site in Salzgitter. While Tesla has repeatedly said the site will bring Germany significantly closer to achieving its e-mobility goals, some locals and environmental groups are unhappy with Musk’s disruptive approach which they say flies in the face of German business culture.

Business aside, Musk’s GigaFest shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, as the tech bro entrepreneur and self-named “Technoking of Tesla” has previously released his own techno and EDM tracks—his latest one was about NFTs, which he then sold as an NFT—and has also been developing a Neuralink chip that streams music directly into your brain while preaching the benefits of nuking Mars. Thanks, but no thanks.