Tesla inks big lease on office/warehouse in Santa Monica

Elon Musk may be pivoting to Texas, but his electric car company is still expanding in Los Angeles.

Tesla signed a five-year lease for an 82,000-square-foot warehouse and office property in Santa Monica, according to the Los Angeles Business Journal. Terms are said to be around $12 million for the life of the lease, according to the report.

Parr Investment Company owns the property at 1100 Colorado Avenue.

Tesla is based in Palo Alto and also leases around 131,000 square feet in Marina del Rey. That least was signed in 2017 and runs at least seven years.

The car company is building a massive “Gigafactory” on 2,100 acres outside Austin, Texas, which will employ an estimated 5,000 people. On Saturday, two men were killed in a Tesla vehicle in Texas in which neither man appeared to be behind the wheel, according to the New York Times.

Musk, who seems to pride himself on being an eccentric billionaire, has been selling off his LA.-area residential properties over the last year. His two other companies — The Boring Company and SpaceX — have sizable footprints in the South Bay.

SpaceX is headquartered in Hawthorne, and the Port of L.A. serves as a departure and arrival point for its floating rocket barges.

The company has been going back and forth with Port of L.A. officials about leasing a 12.5-acre chunk of Terminal Island for a rocket fabrication facility. SpaceX abruptly walked away from discussions in 2019 only to restart negotiations early last year. The company moved its Starship production operation to where else, but the Lone Star state.

Hawthorne also hosts The Boring Company’s research and development high-speed “Loop” tunnel.

[LABJ] — Dennis Lynch