When you have a narcissistic sociopath for a boss don’t expect job security. All these layoffs and his insane letter will do is cultivate toadying, fear, distrust, cliques and a culture of backstabbing within Tesla.
Killed the Golden Goose moment
- Fired the Supercharger head and the entire department
- Fired the lead of new vehicle development
- Previously fired head of battery development
- Constantly “one year away” from Tesla full self driving, whilst Mercedes just launched geofenced FSD, with Mercedes assuming 100% liability during FSD
- Elon just had a out of the blue trip to China, appears to have ‘kissed the ring’ of Beijing, and hyping TaaS robotaxis
What’s Tesla’s USP to an investor now? The supercharger ‘lock in’ and early head start at the EV game are Tesla’s biggest boons, but the former appears to have been gutted and the latter has been squandered on a slow model release schedule
Worldwide food shortages are pretty likely this year, but sure, care about “investors”
I actually don’t care about individual investors, beyond the implications for the broader ‘economy’ if the Tesla bubble bursts. But given how absurd the market cap for Tesla is compared to the traditional automakers, when this hype train stops picking up
speedmore rubes, the rest of us need it to coast down gradually, not crash and burn.
If the Tesla Board had any responsibilities at all, it was to prevent this by ejecting Elmo. They chose to not.
It is now time to stick a fork in it. Billionaires - Away!
Are they going to give him his $60B bonus now?
The shareholders need to start calling out the clear bias of the boards constitution. Vanguard and iShares combined hold more shares than Elon does. It’s clearly doable, it’s just time for some adults in the room. If you hold Vanguard and iShares etfs in your accounts, don’t be afraid to let them know this.
So is the implication that he’s just going to source all those things from a Chinese company? Basically the next Tesla and chargers will just be rebadged BYDs or whatever?
It could be as simple as securing more/better access to China’s significant rare earth deposits that batteries need. Could also be signs that Tesla is offshoring or pushing harder into China’s domestic market, but they’re way behind there
Musk has been reading about all the layoffs happening at other companies who are now floundering due to the loss of institutional competence and memory, and goes “we need some of that shiat STAT!”
All of which makes the decision to get rid of senior director of EV charging Rebecca Tinucci—along with her entire team—a bit of a head-scratcher. . . . Musk told workers that Tesla “will continue to build out some new Supercharger locations, where critical, and finish those currently under construction.”
Many Tesla fans had been holding out hope that Musk would debut a cheap Model 2 EV in recent weeks. Instead, the tycoon promised that robotaxis would save the business . . .
Delivering on that goal is more than just a technical challenge, and it will require the cooperation and approval of state and federal authorities. However, Musk is also dissolving the company’s public policy team in this latest cull.
Yeah that’s the ballgame.
Time to short the stock then, if they are not gonna invest in their own future.
Layoffs tend to precipitate big stock price jumps in my experience. Investors love job losses
Tesla valuation is beyond comprehension, I don’t want to touch it.
Investors love job losses
Once again confirming how sociopathic the stock market can be.
It’s because of the massive short term gains.
I made several thousand dollars in the stock market by buying stocks that announce layoffs. They almost always jump after the announcement unless it has to do with other circumstances like bankruptcy.
They did more layoffs yesterday and the stock price went down lol
They do, to a point.
If it’s a “trim” that is a vague percentage without any standout cuts in recognized people or groups, then good. If there are recognized names or groups, but they are people associated with widely known failures, like a team whose sole responsibility is a proven financial failure, good or even better. If you have people caught up in it who are well recognized for critical successes, then the investors won’t be so bullish.
Here we see two groups seen as responsible for the key success factors of Tesla obliterated, with very little external signs of why this could be a rational move. The other layoffs might have been viewed well, even if some of them were also bad news, but I think these two will be viewed as bad news.
Also, this may be seen as a missed opportunity. Tesla established SC network as the premiere EV charging solution, and made it credibly cover other manufacturers, setting it up as independently valuable with it without Tesala. Tesla ditched the entire team, putting that at risk and taking on expenses to let go of those people for long term salary savings. A different business might have sold off the group intact, not only avoiding severance expense, but also getting a big check in the process from some other company. Keeping the “business” with none of the actual people is a bizarre move.
Amazon has been trimming employee numbers for close to three years now. Any large layoffs now see a dip in stock, so most of the layoffs this year have been small-scale to not worry the investors.
True, at some point investors switch from “good, they are improving efficiency” or “good, they are making way for higher quality hires” to “uhh, is there a problem? Are you going to keep going and risk going under some unknown critical threshold that will impact the health of your business?”.
I imagine the rules are different for Amazon. It’s just a regular corporation not a vanity project.
Nailed it. This round of layoffs is not just “trimming a bloated labor force,” it’s cutting off investment into the future of Tesla as a company, which is a really bad business move when you had an advantage in the past but are now losing it. Turns out not only Musk is a filthy rich a-hole, he’s also terrible at keeping businesses competitive. He absolutely needs to resign if Tesla wants to not fail.
Cutting the supercharger team could be a hedge for Musk personally. The stock tanking seems likely now, so not having this team makes them a less attractive acquisition.
Well that’s embarrassing
Ahhh, the trustworthy test. Sounds like the same type of test that Trump plans to use in his hiring process. Coincidence? I think not. All part of the fascist playbook.
Yes Elmo, I’m sure that will solve your problems. Well done.
Oh Tesla gets the Twitter treatment. At that rate it will be renamed X within the next 7 months. Better make sure X (formerly known as Twitter) has been terminated by then otherwise they have to sue each other…
Tesla will be renamed to “X (formerly known as Tesla)” to keep it distinct from “X (formerly known as Twitter)”. Then, once all his companies have been renamed and finally merged, he’ll just run X into the ground. Way more efficient than doing it for each company individually!
huh
I wonder what’s the probability that the current EV makers might unite to create an open source standard alternative now that this has happened?
There are already 2 of them.
NACS, which is essentially the Tesla charger, was made available to other car manufacturers at no cost already, in 2022. Due to a few reasons, among them the existence of Tesla superchargers already deployed, a lot of companies have adopted this as their charger for newer cars.
Even if Tesla went down completely, their charger is already open, so nah I don’t expect any changes based on this.
Okay, that makes sense. Was going to ask how proprietary/locked that charger system was as it seems to be the immerging standard.
Yeah I’m kinda surprised they made it open, to be honest. But they did, and its in a way that can’t be retracted, so nothing depends on their continuing good behavior.
Its a pretty standard business decision, make it open so everyone uses it and because you manufacture the parts they have to go through you.
This aint Volvo making their three point seat belt open.
Also, I think Tesla saw the way the wind was blowing on standardization. Eventually, the DOT will enforce a standard plug, and if it’s not YOURS, suddenly you have to either remanufacture the cars you’re making, or otherwise refit them to work with the new standard.
A requirement for them to receive $7.5 billion in government funding for charger construction was for them to allow other cars to charge on their network, which required opening the standard.
Open source? Standards?
What?
Do that and Lose the chance of earning billions in royalties if WE manage to corner the market?
None of that will happen unless, say, the European Union will force manufacturers hands.
CCS is already required in Europe, problem is there aren’t nearly as many CCS chargers in the US especially compared to Tesla’s network
Maybe I skimmed that too quickly, but it looks like this is just the execs on top of those departments, not the people working within them.
It’s kinda buried:
All of which makes the decision to get rid of senior director of EV charging Rebecca Tinucci—along with her entire team—a bit of a head-scratcher.
Musk told workers that Tesla “will continue to build out some new Supercharger locations, where critical, and finish those currently under construction.”
Sounds to me like the plan is to finish what is already under contract and do no more. I sure am glad the US authorities committed to that north american charger standard… what’s even the status on getting a full specification for it including third-party development at this point anyway?
I can’t pull a quote for the new vehicle development team’s situation because Tesla basically just keeps making the Model 3 with barely even incremental improvements to it, and even that one has totally inconsistent build quality vehicle to vehicle. Unless someone thinks the Cybertruck is going to save them – hah.
I absolutely hate that Tesla was successful in lobbying the government to use NACS instead of CCS. You can tell that it was lobbyists because seemingly overnight, the government changed from giving grants for CCS (never owned by a single company) to only giving grants for NACS (a proprietary standard that was opened to other companies so that Tesla wouldn’t have to pay to change their chargers). When the government decided to change to NACS, NACS specifications hadn’t even been sent to other companies yet. A new, better CCS plug was even being developed, one that on paper could handle more than NACS.
To shreds, you say?
And the wife?
The death spiral begins.
Begins? It’s been slowly getting worse for years
Yeah, I think this is the event horizon.
Great movie.
fucking terrifying movie. I will never watch it again
The electric car company who spent years pissing off liberals is faling? whodathunkit
Yeah to this day I don’t understand this “genius” business move. My redneck conservative dad sure as hell isn’t buying an electric vehicle anytime soon, even if you put a giant MAGA hat on it.
So the company had a downturn, and has to cut costs to maintain profitability. Charging is not the core product, so why spend money on it. It almost makes sense.
Musk does have a habit of making large single-minded bets and it surely takes a giga-ego to do that. His rise was based on some of those being correct, but we’ll see if this one is
The charging infrastructure is one of the biggest advantages their core product has.
All Tesla owners can take advantage of the higher speeds, relatively low charging price (at least in my area), and plug and charge functionality and that goes a long way in closing the sale for first time EV buyers.
So although not a core product itself, it’s one of the biggest selling points they have. Even non-teslas can charge at compatible stations and that’s just more profit for them. Combined with NACS being the new standard it makes sense to keep investing.
This decision doesn’t really make sense. You’re right though, we’ll see what happens ¯_(ツ)_/¯
