Once again we hear news of layoffs or layoffs, this time Tesla laid off 14 thousand employees globally, Monday (15/4/2024). This number is around 10% of Tesla employees who have to stop working on ongoing projects.
Up to 20% of some departments had to be cut, resulting in employee layoffs, which affected high-performing staff. Tesla’s announcement of layoffs comes a week before Tesla is scheduled to report first-quarter earnings in 2024.
Tesla is laying off employees due to decreased profits caused by a year-long price war in the electric car industry. In 2023, the company delivered 1.81 million vehicles, but its profits slumped due to repeated price cuts to boost sales and weaken competition.
Anonymous Source Reveals Reasons for Tesla Laying Off Employees
According to TechCrunch, an anonymous source said the layoffs by Tesla employee management were largely due to poor financial performance. These layoffs are said to affect employees across all departments and seniority levels. Tesla’s layoffs are due to reduce costs and increase productivity to prepare for the next phase of growth. This was revealed by the company from an internal email from CEO Elon Musk.
An anonymous source said many of the laid-off employees were talented employees. Tesla laid off employees who had worked on projects that were low on Tesla’s priority list. However, it is not known which project is in question. “I lost 20% of my team, some very good players too,” said an anonymous source or Tesla employee.
Apart from the news of Tesla layoffs, there were also employees who resigned independently, namely Drew Baglino, Tesla’s SVP of Powertrain and Energy, and Rohan Patel, VP of Public Policy and Business Development. Patel said he decided to leave Tesla because of major overall changes at the company.
Patel, who has engaged regularly with Tesla customers and fans at X in recent months, declined to get into specifics. He said in a message that it was better for him not to speculate and that Tesla was stronger than ever and change was good. Meanwhile, Baglino said that after 18 years it was time to leave Tesla.
“I feel good about the impact I have achieved, my leadership team is strong, the energy business I am responsible for is running well, and so on,” he wrote in a message.
The shakeup comes as Musk continues to change the company’s direction towards building driverless cars. Tesla recently scrapped plans to build a low-cost electric car with a starting price of $25,000 in favor of using a platform it is developing to power a robotaxi that Musk said would launch on August 8, 2024.
The Indonesian version of this article can be read in Gizmologi.ID
