Alex Bruno
Tesla is eliminating 200 employees from its autonomous driving business in San Mateo, California, as a result of the publicly announced plan to cut its employment by 10% in order to remain competitive. Elon Musk has said that he would have to eliminate every tenth position at Tesla since the company’s ambitious development goals are being thwarted by supply chain problems and rising component prices.
While satirists affectionately referred to this as the “decimation” of Tesla jobs, it appears that the company is moving forward with the plan. According to inside sources, the Autopilot improvement department in San Mateo will lay off more than half of its staff, with the remainder being distributed to other offices. All of this is taking place as Elon Musk blasted the United Auto Workers (UAW) union for having “such much influence over the White House, they can ban Tesla from an EV (Electric Vehicle) conference” in a lengthy interview.
Evidently, he was alluding to a gathering of business leaders that took place at the White House last summer but to which Tesla’s CEO was not invited. Nevertheless, Elon Musk did show up for the White House meeting on EV charging interoperability in April.
The CEO of the Volkswagen Group predicts that VW will overtake Tesla by 2025 because Elon Musk put Tesla in a precarious position by attempting to scale up production at many additional Gigafactories at once:
Elon must simultaneously ramp up two very complicated facilities in Gruenheide and Austin, as well as increase output in Shanghai. He will lose strength as a result of it.
Elon Musk acknowledged that the new Giga plants in Austin and Berlin are losing billions, but Tesla is making many efforts to maintain its profit margins. It has increased the cost of its electric vehicles many times already this year, but it has also frozen recruiting and is beginning to lay off employees, as seen by the most recent round of layoffs at the Autopilot business.
Source: Reuters, WSJ, BloomBerg
