- The layoffs at Tesla aren’t over yet, says Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
- On Monday, he announced the departure of two senior executives and the axing of their divisions.
- Tesla, Musk said, needs to be “absolutely hard core about headcount and cost reduction.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk says the EV giant is not done with laying people off.
The billionaire announced the departure of two senior executives — Tesla’s senior director for charging infrastructure, Rebecca Tinucci, as well as its director for vehicle programs and new products, Daniel Ho — in an email to staff on Monday.
The email, obtained by The Information, noted that both Tinucci’s and Ho’s divisions would be dissolved, with only a few employees getting reassigned. Around 500 people from Tinucci’s division will lose their jobs, The Information reported, citing Musk’s email.
Tesla’s public policy team will also be dissolved, Musk said. Tesla’s vice president of public policy and business development, Rohan Patel, announced his departure earlier on April 15.
And Musk expects more job cuts to come.
Musk said that come 10 a.m. ET on Tuesday, he’ll start asking for resignation letters from Tesla executives who retain “more than three people who don’t obviously pass the excellent, necessary and trustworthy test.”
“Hopefully these actions are making it clear that we need to be absolutely hard core about headcount and cost reduction,” Musk said in his email.
Representatives for Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.
The wave of layoffs are occurring at a rough time for the company, which has been struggling with sluggish sales and heightened competition from Chinese rivals like BYD.
On April 23, Tesla told investors in an earnings call that its quarterly revenue had plunged by 9% year-over-year, its biggest revenue drop since 2012. Earlier this month, Tesla said it had delivered 386,810 cars in the first quarter of 2024, a 20.1% drop from the last quarter.
Musk had announced Tesla’s first round of mass layoffs for this year on April 14, which reduced Tesla’s workforce by more than 10%. The company employed more than 140,000 staff before the layoffs.
