Teutonic Tesla: Elon Musk’s busy week in Germany
The Tesla founder spent much of the week in Germany, hobnobbing with politicians and visiting sites of commercial interest. Between his ventures in mobility and vaccines, his stake in the country appears to be growing.
Elon Musk fans were starting to get nervous. The Tesla founder is an avid Twitter user, but after almost three days in Germany, during which he was received like a rock star, he still hadn’t tweeted. What was going on?
Only when the trip was over did some tweets arrive. “Great trip to Germany,” wrote Musk, followed by one with a few words in German and a photo showing him in old-fashioned carpenter’s clothing on the construction site of the Tesla factory near Berlin.
Musk had already announced the reason for his visit to Germany at the weekend, via Twitter: a visit to the new building called “Gigafactory” and also a “side project” at the mechanical engineering firm Grohmann, which Tesla took over in 2017.
Tesla Grohmann Automation, as the company is now called, is working with the Tübingen biotech company CureVac on a project that could play a major role in the development of a vaccine for COVID-19.
Goal is to print drugs
CureVac is considered a beacon of hope in vaccine development. Allegedly, the US government wanted to buy CureVac, which in turn led the German government to invest via the state-owned owned KfW bank.
CureVac specializes in the development of drugs based on the messenger molecule mRNA (messenger ribonucleic acid). They can be used in cancer therapy, but also in the development of vaccines.