Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk on Thursday noted that his EV company Tesla Inc TSLA has made more EV charging infrastructure in the U.S. than online retailer Amazon.com Inc. AMZN or the federal government.
What Happened: Musk was responding to television presenter John Stossel who took to X to opine that the private sector did more to expand EV charging infrastructure than the government.
“Markets just work better than government,” Stossel wrote on X, formerly Twitter. Despite huge investments, the Biden administration built fewer EV charging stations than Amazon which installed 17,000, he added.
“I think you mean Tesla?” Musk responded to which Stossel acknowledged that Tesla indeed installed many more.
Why It Matters: As per a report from Bloomberg in April, Amazon has installed over 17,000 chargers at about 120 warehouses around the U.S. to power its electric fleet.
Tesla’s charging stations, meanwhile, are for private car owners. The company had 57,579 of its supercharger connectors around the world as of the end of the first quarter. In the U.S., the company currently has over 2,200 public supercharger locations with nearly 26,000 charging ports, according to data from the U.S. Department Of Energy.
The federal government, meanwhile, has only 41 station locations and 80 EV charging ports. Privately owned charging stations make up the majority of U.S. EV charging infrastructure, with 13,472 station locations and 60,213 charging ports.
This is despite the huge investment into EV charging made by the Biden administration. In November 2021, Biden signed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The law included $7.5 billion in EV charging infrastructure, of which $5 billion was allocated to individual states. Earlier this month, Musk slammed the government for the lack of results despite the investment and said, “I’m starting to think that the government is … not efficient at spending.”
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Photo: courtesy of Tesla