Elon Musk still hasn’t finished his 10% layoffs at Tesla and employees are ‘walking on eggshells every day’ (2024)

Over a month into Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk’s plans to slash at least10% of the company’s workforce, he’s still not done. This means anxious employees wake up each dayto check their messages, wondering if they still have a job. The rolling job cuts are likely to extend through at least June, according to people familiar with the matter, who weren’tauthorized to speak publicly about the layoffs.

“It’s difficult to imagine the feeling of walking on eggshells every day at work, uncertain whether or not you’ll be able to pay your bills or feed your family,” Michael Minick, a former Tesla sales representative who was laid off in April,wroteon LinkedIn. “It would be a relief to know that they can breathe and focus on their work, without the gray cloud of uncertainty looming over.”

Tesla’s workforce already has endured dramatic transformation the last few years — the onetime Silicon Valley upstart with a maniacal vision on clean energy is now concentratedin Texasand fixated on other undertakings, includingartificial intelligenceandrobots.

Somestill with the company say Musk has sapped morale by prioritizinga robotaxi over a $25,000 electric vehicle. They also say amission that had inspired legions of Musk acolytes has been muddied.

Musk has yet to give staff an “all clear” indication that the job cuts are over, leading co-workers to darkly joke with one another about anxiety andinsomnia. One current employee described the atmosphere as akin toSquid Game, the hit television series in which characters facing financial hardship fight for their lives playing deadly children’s contests.

The waves of dismissals, which already have hit thousands across departments including sales, human resources and virtually the entireSuperchargerdivision, are expected to gut significant parts ofTesla, whichstarted the year with more than 140,000 employees. Musk has pushed for a 20% reduction in headcount, Bloomberg reported last month.

In the Supercharger division, some employees found out that Max de Zegher, the director of charging for North America, had been laid off afterhis Microsoft Teams icon suddenly went gray,indicating that he was no longer with the company.

Many on theteam spent the next several dayssaying their goodbyes, cracking jokes and making references to the Titanic,according to Joel Musial,who was laid off from his job as a Tesla construction manager.“We were just missing the string quartet!” Musialwroteon LinkedIn.

The gallows humor pervaded the Supercharging team, which had set upmore than 6,200 stations and 57,000 connectors worldwide and was in the process ofopening the networkto other automakers, which should increase usage.

Musk says Teslastill plans to growthe network, albeit at a slower pace.Herehiredde Zegher, but hasn’t said how many others will be asked to return.

It’s also unclear whether the company will have enough personnel to sustain Supercharger stations, after layoffs hit several technician groups. A former employee in California said two dozen people were cut from an 80-person team that maintained and fixedSuperchargersin Northern California, leaving gaps in both geography and specialties.

The region now has just one employee in an over 200-mile stretch between Santa Rosa and Eureka, said the person, who was cut two weeks after the initial layoff announcement.

Another person in a similar role based in Canada predictedchaos after he and dozens of others were let go, since many Tesla charging stations are hours apart,and the amount of work requiredwill only increase once more companies’ customers get access.

He said he’d worked for two weeks after the initial layoff announcement in a state of distraction and uncertainty, where an ever-growing workload and constantly disappearing co-workers made it difficult to concentrate. On his last day at Tesla, he said he was dispatching technicians and attending his daily slate of meetings,only to find himself locked out of his company laptop at 10:45 p.m. By 11:01 p.m. that night, hereceived the layoff noticeat his personal account.

The cuts are hitting at a time of sluggish demand for the broader EV industry, which is heapingpressure on a workforce already coming to grips with changes in the company’s culture, according to a former sales employee.The person saidhe’d already seen significant turnover in his near-decade with Tesla, and that each departurecostthe carmakercrucialinstitutional knowledge.

“Great companies are made up of equal parts great people and great products, and the latter are only possible when its people are thriving,”Rich Otto, who resigned as Tesla’s head of product launches this month, said in a LinkedIn post that he deleted after media outlets reported on it. “The recent layoffs that are rocking the company and its morale have thrown this harmony out of balance, and it’s hard to see the long game.”