Elon Musk Measures Tesla's Gigafactory With an Odd Metric

On Friday night, amid the opening celebration for Tesla’s Gigafactory 1, Elon Musk used a perplexing metric to measure his experimental “machine that builds the machine.” According to a tweet from Musk, Nevada’s Gigafactory 1 is equal in scale to 50 billion hamsters.

Well, ok then.

The grand opening in Storey County, Nevada in no way marks the completion of Gigafactory 1 (it’s about 14 percent done), but the celebration was notable for offering another glimpse inside the massive building that some see as the technological equivalent of Willy Wonka’s factory. Comparing the enigmatic building to hamsters only heightens that allure.

When all is said and done, Tesla is hoping that its Gigafactory will function as a fully automated battery production plant for its vehicles.

While there hasn’t been a lot of concrete information coming out of the plant, those officials who have seen it are nothing short of giddy about the possibilities. So far, Tesla’s project has already injected a serious amount of capital into the Nevada economy, hiring in-house construction teams to build the factory out as well as equipping Storey County with the means to keep the building safe in the event of an emergency.

And with a little more than $300 million already invested into Gigafactory 1’s projected $5 billion budget, there’s still a lot more production to go until the building hits its full hamster potential.