Tesla Warns Giga Berlin Workers: No Union Control, No Expansion

There is a specific kind of pressure that only works if the audience believes the threat is real. Elon Musk applied it this week at Giga Berlin, where workers vote March 2–4 on whether IG Metall takes control of the factory’s works council. The message, screened for employees on Wednesday, February 25, and published as an interview on X with plant senior director André Thierig — and first reported by Handelsblatt before Business Insider picked it up: keep outside organizations out, or forget about expansion.

• The Fact: Musk said Tesla “wouldn’t expand” Giga Berlin if “outside organizations” gained influence at the site, stopping short of threatening closure but making expansion contingent on the election outcome.
• The Delta: The warning was screened for workers the day before Tesla and IG Metall agreed to a public truce ahead of the works council vote, making Musk’s comments a notable escalation running in parallel with management’s ceasefire signals.
• The Context: Tesla’s European sales collapsed in 2025, and January 2026 figures show just 8,000 units sold across the EU — less than half of what Chinese rival BYD moved in the same month.
• The Buyer Impact: If IG Metall wins the council, Giga Berlin’s workforce gains formal negotiating rights over pay and hours. Whether that actually derails any expansion plans depends entirely on how seriously Tesla means what Musk said.

Musk’s Expansion Promise Has a Condition Attached

In the interview posted to X, Musk outlined what Giga Berlin could become: a site for battery cell production, Cybercab robotaxi manufacturing, and Optimus robot assembly. That is a significant industrial footprint for Tesla’s only European factory. But the offer came with an explicit condition.

“Things certainly get harder if there are outside organizations who are pushing Tesla in the wrong direction,” Musk said. “It’s difficult to say that then we would expand, if we had outside organizations who were making things very difficult. We’re not going to shut down the factory, but we wouldn’t expand it either.”

The language is careful. No shutdown threat. Just a ceiling on ambition, tied directly to the election result. Handelsblatt first reported the remarks; they were screened internally before Musk posted the full interview publicly on X.

The works council is not optional under German law. It is an elected employee body with legal standing to negotiate working conditions, pay structures, and hours. Tesla has operated without one at Giga Berlin for years. That ends with this election, regardless of which slate wins. The real question is whether IG Metall’s candidates take the majority of seats.

The Tesla-IG Metall Dispute Ran Hot Before the Truce

The weeks leading up to this vote have not been quiet. Tesla filed a criminal complaint earlier this month against an IG Metall representative, alleging that the union rep secretly recorded an internal meeting at Giga Berlin. IG Metall denied the allegation and filed its own complaint, accusing Thierig of defamation.

Both sides then pulled back. The truce, reached at a Frankfurt (Oder) labor court, paused the public fighting ahead of the vote. It was framed as a ceasefire, not a resolution. Musk’s interview, screened for workers the day before the truce was announced, suggests management had its own communication strategy running alongside the peace talks.

The headcount dispute adds another layer. Documents obtained by Handelsblatt earlier this year suggested a discrepancy of around 1,700 workers between Giga Berlin’s official headcount and what works council election records showed. Tesla pushed back on that framing. The argument over who actually works at the factory has direct implications for how many seats are up for election and who is eligible to vote.

European Sales Give Musk’s Warning an Uncomfortable Backdrop

Threatening to withhold expansion from a factory that may not need more capacity right now is a complicated position. Tesla’s German sales fell 60% in June 2025. EU-wide registrations dropped nearly 38% for the full year. January 2026 brought 8,000 European sales against a BYD total that Business Insider confirmed was more than double Tesla’s — though no source has published BYD’s exact January figure.

The causes are not purely political. Brand damage from Musk’s endorsement of Germany’s far-right AfD party played a role. So did increased competition from Chinese manufacturers and a product lineup that went without meaningful updates for too long. Tesla replaced its global sales chief for the fourth time in 18 months in February — which itself tells the story of how management views the situation.

Against that backdrop, promising Cybercab and Optimus production at Giga Berlin reads partly as a genuine strategic vision and partly as something to dangle in front of workers before they vote. The Cybercab program manager quit the day after the first unit rolled off the line — not exactly a sign of smooth execution on that front.

FSD Approval in the Netherlands Is Also on the Table

Buried at the end of the Musk-Thierig interview was a separate claim: Tesla expects approval to sell its Full Self-Driving driver assistance technology in the Netherlands on March 20. That date is specific enough to be meaningful, or to be wrong.

The Dutch regulator denied a previous Tesla FSD approval claim back in November 2025, going so far as to ask Tesla fans to stop calling its customer service line after Musk announced something the agency said hadn’t happened. Supervised FSD testing in Europe formally began in February 2026, so an approval timeline in March is at least plausible. We’ll see if it holds.

EVXL’s Take

Musk’s message to Giga Berlin workers is a classic management play: vote the way we want, or the good future doesn’t happen. The problem is that the credibility of the threat depends on the credibility of the promise. Right now, Tesla’s European expansion story has a lot of holes in it.

Cybercab production at Giga Berlin is years away at best. The program manager just quit. Optimus is still pre-commercial. Battery cell production at the site has been “planned” since the factory opened in 2022. None of this is imminent, which makes withholding it a low-cost threat.

What’s real is the sales collapse. Giga Berlin has capacity for over 375,000 vehicles per year. Tesla sold roughly 235,000 across all of Europe in 2025. A factory running well below capacity in a market where the brand is losing ground to BYD doesn’t have obvious expansion needs regardless of who runs the works council. IG Metall winning this election won’t cause the European sales slump. By most accounts, Musk’s political activity in Germany did far more damage to European sales than any works council ever could.

One more thing worth noting: in the 2024 works council election at Giga Berlin, IG Metall won the most individual votes at 39.4% but non-union lists still secured a majority of seats. History could repeat. That’s why I’d frame the prediction carefully.

My call: IG Metall wins the most votes again and this time converts that into a seat majority. Tesla management escalates rhetoric for a few weeks, then settles into the negotiating relationship German law requires. By Q3 2026, the two sides will have reached a working agreement on hours and pay, and the expansion question will be answered entirely by whether European sales recover — not by who controls the works council.

Editorial Note: AI tools were used to assist with research and archive retrieval for this article. All reporting, analysis, and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.