Death Reported at Tesla Factory

OSHA has opened an investigation.

Death at the Gigafactory

A death has been reported at Tesla's Gigafactory in Austin, Texas.

According to local ABC affiliate KVUE, authorities were called out to the facility on Thursday, following reports of an adult patient in cardiac arrest.

While the person was reportedly rushed to the hospital in critical condition, the local county sheriff's office also noted that it was called out to a report of a "deceased person," suggesting the patient had died.

Details are still sparse and the cause of death remains unknown, but the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) confirmed to KVUE that it has opened an investigation.

Pattern Recognition

Drone pilot and Tesla fan Joe Tegtmeyer, who has flown his drones over the Gigafactory many times, suggested in a tweet that the death "may be related to a temporary work stoppage on the South Extension construction site."

"Unsure if it was a contractor or not, but appears to have been a heart attack," he added.

As Teslarati reports, the extension is expected to house a massive supercomputer cluster to train Tesla's Full Self-Driving software.

Unsurprisingly, Tesla has yet to comment publicly. But the EV maker has been the subject of workplace safety investigations in the past.

The company has garnered a reputation for what CEO Elon Musk calls a "hardcore" work culture. Employees have to deal with infamously long hours, unsafe working conditions, and plenty of harassment and hate speech aimed at workers of color.

Last year, Chinese government inspectors found that Tesla's Shanghai factory had weaknesses in its safety measures following the death of an employee in February 2023.

At Musk's space venture SpaceX, worker injuries have also soared, with Reuters finding last year that there had been at least 600 previously unreported workplace injuries at the company.

We still don't know if the latest death at Tesla's Austin factory was in any way related to these harsh working conditions.

But given Tesla's total lack of a PR department, it's unlikely we'll get more details about the incident until OSHA has completed its investigation.

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