Fill Me In

A case of mistaken identity on LinkedIn has sent job hunters looking to work with Elon Musk’s electric vehicle and clean energy company, Tesla, in disarray.

Various news outlets yesterday (22 September) reported a new job listing for a Senior Developer under Tesla on LinkedIn, but further investigations have found that the five-day-old listing is for Tesla Consulting Pte Ltd instead.

Who’s Tesla Consulting?

Tesla Consulting is a Singapore-based business process and IT solutions consulting firm. The company’s main industries are in the energy market, IT infrastructure and software applications.

They are currently seeking a Senior Developer to join their team. The Senior Developer should be familiar with coding languages, such as C#, API Development, SQL, HTML, and JavaScript.

But what about Tesla?

Musk’s Tesla did post a number of job listings for Singapore back in July 2020. Among the roles posted were for a Customer Support Specialist, Service Advisor, Sales Advisor, Vehicle Operations Specialist, and more. The job postings could signal another try at entering Singapore.

Musk, who is CEO of Tesla, has criticised Singapore in the past for not being supportive of electric vehicles. The city-state is still heavily reliant on fossil fuels, which makes it difficult to reason that electric cars here would be eco-friendlier than traditionally petrol-powered cars.

The electric cars are still popular in Singapore, however. They are usually brought in by parallel importers, which re-sells cars direct from manufacturing factories, rather than rely on third-party distributors. A quick check on sgCarMart shows that there are at least three models currently available for sale in Singapore.

What’s in a name?

The name ‘Tesla’ comes from Nikola Tesla, a 19th century Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer and mechanical engineer best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system. Fellow inventor Thomas Edison has been credited as his rival, and the two were in a ‘war of the currents’, with their competing electricity supply system.