GM CEO Barra Admits She Told Biden Tesla Deserved Credit He Gave Her Company

Mary Barra just said the quiet part out loud. At the New York Times Dealbook Summit on Wednesday, the GM CEO revealed she privately told President Biden that Tesla and Elon Musk deserved the credit he was heaping on her and General Motors for leading America’s electric vehicle revolution.

“He was crediting me and I said, ‘Actually, I think a lot of that credit goes to Elon and Tesla,'” Barra told interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin. “You know me, Andrew. I don’t want to take credit for things.”

The admission comes four years after the infamous May 2021 White House EV summit where Biden invited executives from GM, Ford, and Stellantis, but pointedly excluded Musk and Tesla. At the time, Barra said she hadn’t given “a lot of thought” to the snub. Now we know she was privately pushing back.

The numbers from that era tell the real story. According to Business Insider, in Q4 2021, the same quarter Biden praised GM for “leading the electric car revolution,” the company delivered exactly 26 electric vehicles. Tesla delivered 300,000.

The Snub That Changed American Politics

Musk never stayed quiet about the slight. In December 2021, he posted on X:

“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.”

Even former Vice President Kamala Harris acknowledged the damage. In her memoir “107 Days,” she called the exclusion a “big mistake” and wrote that if you’re convening the nation’s EV manufacturers and the biggest player isn’t there, “it simply doesn’t make sense.”

Her three-word verdict: “Musk never forgave it.”

That grudge appears to have reshaped American politics. Musk went on to contribute nearly $300 million to Republican campaigns, served as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in Trump’s second administration, and became one of the president’s most visible allies before their relationship soured over the summer.

Barra’s Convenient Timing

The confession arrives at a particularly awkward moment for GM. On the same day Barra spoke at Dealbook, the Trump administration announced it was rolling back Biden’s aggressive fuel economy standards, with Barra herself praising the move.

Speaking before the White House announcement, Barra told the summit that people should buy EVs based on their merits, not government incentives. “People choose an EV because it’s a better performance vehicle and it fits their life,” she said.

This from the CEO whose company just laid off more than 3,300 EV workers, slashed Factory Zero production by 50%, and idled $2 billion battery plants in Ohio and Tennessee. GM’s CFO recently admitted the company expects “EV demand growth to slow pretty significantly” after federal tax credits expired on September 30.

EVXL’s Take

There’s something almost performance art about this confession. Barra is rewriting history while that history is still being written, and the revision just happens to align with the current political winds.

We’ve documented GM’s pattern of saying one thing publicly while doing another. As we reported in October, Barra told shareholders EVs “remain our North Star” during the Q3 earnings call, then announced 3,300 EV layoffs within weeks. The company’s Ultium battery plants, once heralded as the future of American manufacturing, are now sitting largely idle.

The broader story is one we’ve been tracking since the tax credits ended. In our Battery Belt investigation, we documented how $28 billion in taxpayer subsidies built an industry that couldn’t survive six weeks without government life support. EV sales cratered 24% in October alone.

Now Barra wants credit for privately telling Biden what everyone could see in the sales data: Tesla built the EV industry, and GM was along for the subsidized ride.

The irony cuts deep. Musk, the man Biden snubbed, later campaigned for Trump and helped kill the very subsidies that propped up GM’s EV ambitions. Now Barra is praising Trump’s rollback of emission standards while admitting she knew all along who really deserved credit for the EV revolution.

Four years late. Thousands of layoffs later. And only after the political calculus changed.

What do you think about Barra’s belated acknowledgment? Share your thoughts in the comments below.