TBD | What’s Driving Tesla’s Layoffs?

What Next | Daily News and Analysis

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🗓️ 19 April 2024

⏱️ 20 minutes

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Summary

Tesla’s market cap has dropped. The company had its biggest round of layoffs ever. The Cybertruck doesn’t seem to be taking off. And Elon’s posting through it. Is Tesla in serious trouble? Guest: Dana Hull, Bloomberg reporter and contributor to the podcast Elon, Inc. Want more What Next TBD? Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listening to the whole What Next family and all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of our show page. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to get access wherever you listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	On Sunday evening, Bloomberg reporter Dana Hall was at home in California
0:07.8	when suddenly her phone started blowing up with messages from Tesla employees.
0:13.0	It was like, the layoff rumors are serious and I'm hearing this and I'm hearing that and I was like, okay, like Sunday night,
0:21.0	that's pretty interesting because usually when companies lay people
0:24.2	off it's during their work week not on the weekend.
0:26.9	Dana covers Tesla and all things Elon Musk so she started reaching out to her contacts trying to figure out exactly what was happening at Tesla.
0:35.6	I just was like texting people have you heard anything have you heard anything what's going on and then I think I went to bed and then when I woke up like the news is out like in the middle of the night
0:46.4	Tesla had sent an email about everyone saying that they were doing a restructuring and that roughly
0:51.5	10% of the global workforce would be impacted but then
0:54.6	also overnight a lot of people got these layoff notices.
0:58.6	Roughly 14,000 people, the largest workforce cut in Tesla's history.
1:05.1	And some people, Dana says, didn't even know what was happening until they actually got to
1:09.5	work.
1:10.7	The notification that you were laid off went to your personal email and many people woke up on Monday morning and were doing the Monday morning thing like dropping kids at school racing to work stuck in traffic and did not realize that they had been laid off
1:24.8	until they got to the office and their badge did not work.
1:29.1	By almost any measure, Tesla has had a rough year, and Dana expected some kind of
1:36.2	restructuring was coming.
1:38.1	The company had a very terrible first quarter in terms of car deliveries.
1:42.3	They missed their numbers by a mile, Wall Street
1:45.5	was disappointed, they have 46,000 excess cars in inventory, then they were able to
1:50.1	deliver and the company's business is basically selling cars. So when you have a bad quarter, usually there's a lot of belt tightening.
1:57.0	Tesla did not do wide-scale layoffs in 2023, which was in a lot of big tech companies did, so in some senses they were almost overdue for one,
	...

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