The headcount reduction continues at Elon Musk’s Tesla, as the EV car giant struggles with falling sales, intense competition, and waning consumer demand for electric vehicles.
CNBC reported that last week Tesla in a filing with the California Employment Development Department confirmed it is cutting about 600 more jobs at its manufacturing facilities and engineering offices in Fremont and Palo Alto, California.
The latest round of layoffs have reportedly axed roles including entry-level positions and even directors. Indeed factory workers, software developers and robotics engineers are said to be among the latest redundancies.
Restructuring operation
Last month Tesla had announced its biggest-ever round of layoffs, affecting more than 10 percent of staff worldwide (or 14,000 jobs).
Tesla had a total workforce of 140,473 employees at the end of 2023.
Previous filings revealed that Tesla would cut more than 6,300 jobs across California; Austin, Texas; and Buffalo, New York.
Then it emerged that Elon Musk had also shut down the division that runs Tesla’s supercharger business, and also dismissed two senior executives.
The head of the superchargers group, Rebecca Tinucci, and Daniel Ho, head of new products, along with their entire teams (about 500 people were in the supercharger group) were handed their marching orders.
However the axing of the supercharger team proved controversial due to ongoing public concern about the state of EV charging infrastructure. Some media reports have suggested Elon Musk is attempting to rehire some of the fired supercharger team.
It seems that Rebecca Tinucci had resisted the large headcount cuts that Musk has demanded, and that the move to disband the supercharger business had been Musk’s response.
After Tinucci’s sacking, Musk reportedly told other executives in an email that they, too, would be fired if they did not deliver the required cuts.
Meanwhile Elon Musk has said the company still planned to expand the Supercharger network, but would slow the addition of new locations while focusing on uptime and expansion of existing locations. He indicated that Tesla would spend over $500m on the expansion.
Then earlier this month Tesla laid off employees in its software, service and engineering teams.
Tesla troubles
According to the CNBC report, among the highest-level roles eliminated in Fremont were two environmental health and safety directors, and a user experience design director.
Meanwhile in Palo Alto, home to the company’s engineering headquarters, 233 more employees, including two directors of technical programs, reportedly lost their jobs.
Tesla has also terminated a majority of staff involved in designing and improving apps made for customers and employees.
All of these job losses comes after Tesla recently posted its biggest revenue drop since 2012, while profits fell over 50 percent amid its ongoing restructuring.
Indeed, such is investor concern, that Tesla’s stock price has tumbled about 30 percent so far this year.
Meanwhile Musk presses ahead with a planned $56 billion (£44.5bn) pay package that was vetoed by a judge in January.