Well, it's not exactly a scientific survey. But the answer to Elon Musk's simple question "Giga Texas?" has garnered an overwhelming "Hell yeah" from the Twitterverse.
So far, 80 percent of the 267,000 or so votes were for "Hell Yeah." With the other 20 percent casting their votes to the "Nope" option.
Update: After a bit more than a day, Musk deleted Austin from as his Twitter profile location. He also tweeted "What if there was an AI programmed to want to pick as many strawberries as possible, and so it cultivated nothing but strawberries on all of Earth’s land? Then it would be Strawberry Fields Forever!" And he used the platform to promote his EDM song on Soundcloud and made fun of a Pornhub meme. So you never quite know what you're going to get.
The Tesla leader, riding a powerful wave of good news for his company's stock, has also said he's looking for tech talent in Austin.
"We are (obviously) also looking for world-class chip designers to join our team, based in both Palo Alto & Austin," he tweeted earlier this week.
Of course, this could be some classic Musk teasing -- not a promise of a new plant or some other big Austin-related news.
The Tesla founder and CEO is in Texas this week for career day at SpaceX's career day at its launch facility in Boca Chica, the small beach town on the border with Mexico and the Gulf of Mexico. He's working on SpaceX's new Starship, a super-sized rocket that is being made to carry cargo and crew to the Moon, Mars and beyond.
"Going max hardcore on design/production Starship here in Boca. It’s awesome! Feels a bit like a Mars simulator," Musk tweeted earlier this week. The ship is expected to go on a 12-mile high test flight later this year.
But the Gigafactory would be decidedly different than a rocket launching facility.
Should he pick Central Texas for a Gigafactory, it'd be a rather unique addition to the Austin business ecosystem.
While Austin has become accustom to being a secondary or satellite office location for many big tech companies including Apple, Google, Facebook, IBM and Amazon that hire for a lot of software and finance positions, the Gigafactory presents a more manual labor type of workforce, potentially diversifying the local economy somewhat while also bringing more technical jobs to the area.
Last year, the AP reported that there were 7,059 employees working in the Tesla/Panasonic gigafactory in Nevada with average hourly wages of $25.78.
