Elon Musk’s Hardcore Cost-Cutting Supercharger Team Gets Fired

With its sudden decision to close most of its Supercharger network, Tesla stunned the electric vehicle industry, halted growth plans, and left almost everyone paying attention confused.

This is not just because of the amount of cars the Austin, Texas-based company sells; it also dominates the EV charging industry. BloombergNEF estimates that the company provided about 8% of the world’s public charging capacity the previous year.

That may all be in flux, however. Musk sent senior executives a letter on Monday threatening to remove any CEO “who retains more than three people who don’t obviously pass the excellent, necessary and trustworthy test.” According to Elecktrek, Rebecca Tinucci, head of the Supercharger division, argued with Musk and tried to fire less employees than he asked. The CEO let go of almost every employee of the 500-person company as “an example.”

(To embed: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1785406795814510785) 

The firing had instant effects.

Why had Elon Musk gone ahead with the layoffs?

Andres Pinter, co-CEO of Bullet EV Charging Solutions, said to Reuters on Tuesday, “My team woke up to a sharp kick in the pants this morning as contractors for the Supercharger network.” Pinter later revealed to The Wall Street Journal.

Experts have also sharply attacked the decision, pointing out that one of the main obstacles preventing people from purchasing EVs is range anxiety, or charging anxiety. One of the only sure solutions to such issues, especially if the increase of EV sales slows down, is to rapidly expand infrastructure across North America.

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“Growing the Supercharger network, just at a slower pace for new locations and more focus on 100% uptime and expansion of existing locations,” Musk said on Tuesday. Bloomberg says Tesla had already considered hiring back some of the sacked staff members to help with the slower growth.

With the Tuesday layoffs, Tesla will have fired at least 14,500 workers since April.

Last month, Tesla said that “more than 10%,” or at least 14,000, of its 140,000 workers worldwide will be let off. Yet, Musk allegedly wanted to fire around 20% of the employees because he believed it would be the amount of revenue Tesla would lose between the fourth quarter of 2023 and the first quarter of 2024.

Bloomberg projected last month that some 20,000 people may have lost their jobs in the first wave of layoffs.

Apart from the rank-and-file workers, at least six well-known executives have either already left or intend to do so later this year. One of them is Daniel Ho, who has worked with Tesla for more than 10 years and was up until Tuesday in charge of its new products business.

Drew Baglino of powertrain and energy engineering and Rohan Patel of public policy and commercial development left this month. As the first quarter results teleconference was coming to an end, Martin Viecha, head of investor relations, announced his departure. And this week one of the company’s most senior women, Allie Arebalo, who supervised human resources, resigned.