Tesla CEO Musk Agrees With Investor Srinivasan: California Construction 100X Slower Than China

A Twitter user posted a complaint on October 18 about insufficient construction speed in the Silicon Valley. Balaji Srinivasan, an entrepreneur and angel investor, replied, “This is because regulations promote California from building in the physical world. Hence, the cloud.” He added, “Most people don’t realize that construction in California isn’t 10% slower than the state of the art, but more like 100X slower.” Under this tweet, Tesla CEO Elon Musk replied, “True.”

Srinivasan’s tweet included four short videos to prove the speed of construction in China. The content includes a clip taken on January 19, 2018, when around 1,500 workers spent just nine hours paving the railway for a new train station in Fujian Province, southern China. In 2015, Beijing’s Sanyuan Bridge completed refurbishment with 43 hours and reopened before 6 o’clock, the evening traffic peak. While other countries are still thinking about building high-speed rails on land, China has already built high-speed rail to the sea. In addition, a Chinese real estate enterprise built a 10-story apartment within 28 hours by using module assembly.

Under Musk’s reply to this tweet, some users pointed out that the Tesla Gigafactory Shanghai in China took only 11 months from construction to production and delivery. In fact, in 2018, Musk forwarded the above-mentioned video of “Fujian Longyan Station project,” saying that “China’s progress in advanced infrastructure is more than 100 times faster than the US.”

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China has always attached great importance to speeding up infrastructure construction. Before 1988, there was no expressway in China. By the end of 2021, the mileage of expressways in China had reached 169,000 km, an increase of 8,090 kilometers over the end of the previous year, ranking first in the world.

To explain this, Cai Tongjuan, a researcher at the Financial Research Institute of Renmin University of China, said in an interview that in the process of infrastructure construction, the scale of government investment and public expenditure has expanded, which has doubled the expansion of national income, and the achievements of infrastructure construction will also promote the perfect development of relevant industrial chains and promote economic development. It can also effectively stimulate investment, expand domestic demand and promote the development of the whole industrial chain in related fields.

In addition, according to China News, a chief engineer of China Railway Fourth Bureau Group Ltd., Co. believes this is because departments are fully supported from project establishment through approval and construction. Secondly, China has a strong and system-wide manufacturing industry, and the raw materials needed for infrastructure construction are abundant. Thirdly, the leading power of science and technology has been continuously enhanced, and the innovation of process and tooling has been accelerating the speed of engineering construction.