Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun marks roll-out of 100,000th EV by paying homage to Tesla’s Elon Musk

The Chinese smartphone giant reached that production landmark in just 230 days since launching its SU7 electric sedan

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Xiaomi chief executive Lei Jun’s social media post on Wednesday shows him sleeping on the factory floor, in a nod to Tesla’s Elon Musk. Photo: Weibo

Published: 7:30pm, 13 Nov 2024Updated: 8:27pm, 13 Nov 2024

Xiaomi founder, chairman and chief executive Lei Jun on Wednesday marked the roll-out of the firm’s 100,000th electric vehicle (EV) from the assembly line with a social-media post of himself sleeping on the factory floor, paying homage to what Elon Musk did during the early days of Tesla.

In a post published at 7:57am on his personal Weibo account, Lei wrote that it took Xiaomi just 230 days to reach that milestone, touting the company’s “incredible speed for a new entrant in the automotive industry”.

Lei’s social-media paean to Musk referred to the Tesla chief executive’s habit of sleeping on the factory floor, when the US electric carmaker was starting to ramp up production of its Model 3 EV in 2018.

In February this year, an old video of Musk talking about this habit at a New York conference went viral on social media after a user of X, formerly Twitter, shared a clip with his quote that read: “The reason I slept on the floor was not because I couldn’t go across the road and be at a hotel. It was because I wanted my circumstances to be worse than anyone else at the company. Whenever they felt pain, I wanted mine to be worse.”

Xiaomi chief executive Lei Jun and staff commemorate the 100,000th SU7 electric sedan rolled out from the assembly line. Photo: X

A 2022 report by US financial news website Business Insider quoted Musk at an industry conference saying: “I was living in the factory in Fremont [California] and the one in Nevada for three years straight … Those were my primary residences.”