Grace Kay
Updated Tue, April 16, 2024
Tesla laid off more than 10% of its workforce on Sunday night.
Some factory employees only realized they were laid off when their badges didn't work, sources said.
Staff at the Nevada factory waited two hours to enter because of badge checks, one source said.
Tesla told staff it was laying off more than 10% of its workforce on Sunday night, but some workers didn't realize they were laid off until they showed up at the company's facilities, five current or former workers told Business Insider.
The cuts impacted engineers and production associates alike. At Tesla's factory in Sparks, Nevada, workers faced a roughly two-hour line to get into the facility on Monday morning as a result of badge checks, one worker said.
At the factory, the security team was scanning the badges of workers coming out of the shuttles that ferry people between the factory and nearby parking lots, said two current Tesla workers who requested anonymity since they weren't authorized to speak about the matter. Typically, security guards inspect workers' badges at the site, but they don't usually scan them directly, the two workers said. On Monday morning, the officials picked out the workers who'd been laid off and sent them back in separate vans, the two workers said.
Three other former Tesla employees said workers at the Fremont factory were told by security that if their badges didn't work, they were no longer employed.
Tesla employees who were terminated received notice via their personal emails on Sunday night, and their access to Tesla systems was revoked, four workers said. The companywide email that Elon Musk sent announcing the cuts was delivered shortly before midnight PT on Sunday, according to a time stamp on the memo viewed by BI.
"We have done a thorough review of the organization and made the difficult decision to reduce our headcount globally. Unfortunately as a result, your position has been eliminated by this restructuring," read a separate email notifying impacted employees they'd been laid off, according to a copy viewed by BI.
The email sent directly to laid-off staff said the cuts would be effective immediately and workers would receive information regarding their severance within 48 hours.
The same day Tesla announced layoffs, at least two executives resigned from the company. The senior vice president of powertrain and electrical engineering, Drew Baglino, and the vice president of public policy and business development, Rohan Patel, said on X they had left Tesla as of Sunday.
A spokesperson for Tesla didn't respond to a request for comment. Ahead of the layoffs, Tesla employed more than 140,000 workers globally, including over 3,000 at its factory in Nevada.
Tesla workers aren't the first to unceremoniously discover they've been terminated while trying to access their former place of work. Last year, some former Google employees told BI they learned they'd been laid off when they couldn't badge into the office.
I relocated across the country when Tesla asked. Then I was laid off 6 months later.
Grace Kay
Tue, April 16, 2024
On Sunday night, Elon Musk sent a company-wide email to Tesla staff announcing a workforce reduction of more than 10%.
One laid-off Tesla worker said they moved about 6 months ago for the job before being let go.
They moved cross-country after Tesla offered them a stipend to do it.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with a former Tesla employee who was laid off on Sunday night and requested anonymity to protect their privacy. Business Insider has verified their identity and employment. A spokesperson for Tesla did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I started at Tesla as a commercial field services technician during the pandemic. I handled the troubleshooting and maintenance for Tesla's energy department.
I started out with the company in California and since have moved twice while working for Tesla.
I just moved across the country for the job six months ago.
Tesla transferred me to one of its southern regions to service its energy department. The company needed someone in the region and hadn't had anybody on the ground there for over a year. People had to fly out to the area periodically to service it.
For a while, I was flying out. For like a period of three months, I was two weeks on, two weeks off, just picking up the slack.
Then Tesla asked me if I'd consider moving out there with my wife. I told them I'd only consider it if they paid for our move. They ended up helping with the relocation process and offered a stipend.
We packed up and left in about a week. We sold most of our stuff and rented a big U-Haul to drive down.
I was completely blindsided when I woke up on Monday morning to the layoff notice.
I woke up on Monday morning, trying to clock in to work. And my phone said something along the lines of: password error, contact IT.
So I went to my laptop to try to log in and I was locked out of my computer too, with the IT number right there on the screen. I called IT and they said I needed to contact HR. Then I went to my personal email account and I saw an email from Tesla that was sent out overnight. It was that generic letter — one that a lot of other people have said they got.
I felt like I was doing well and receiving positive feedback from my managers. In that layoff letter they said the cuts were due to redundancy, but I didn't feel like my role was redundant.
I feel like Tesla could have handled the layoffs better. It was impersonal and abrupt.
Now my wife and I feel like we're kind of stuck.
We're in a town where I probably won't be able to find a lot of other opportunities without having to commute around an hour and a half to work both ways because of the rural location. We're also far away from family and without a nearby support system to help us out.
We lost some of our safety net when we moved. We rented a home that was well within our budget with my Tesla pay, but less so now that I've been laid off. Now we're stuck in the lease for six more months.
When we moved for Tesla we didn't take it lightly, but we didn't expect this. Leaving was tough because we'd been living near family. I have two children, a 17-year-old and a 9-year-old, and we had to uproot them.
Now I feel like we rolled the dice and we've kind of shot ourselves in the foot as a result.
A esla worker who was laid off a month after he joined says he can't pay his rent
Jyoti Mann
Wed, April 17, 2024
Tesla laid off more than 10% of its workforce, a memo sent by CEO Elon Musk showed.
One worker who lost his job a month after joining Tesla told KVUE he couldn't pay his rent.
The layoffs follow a difficult first quarter for Tesla, which saw a 20% sales drop.
An employee who'd been working at Tesla for about a month learned he'd been laid off on Monday, local news station KVUE reported.
Ezekiel Love told the Texas-based station that he joined the EV maker a month ago to help assemble Model Y cars at its headquarters, but then received a termination letter on Monday, which KVUE included in its news segment.
Love said, "Wow, no warning at all. I don't have a job, I can't pay my rent."
He added, "They're supposed to be leading in innovation, I feel like that would have been the best opportunity for me to learn manufacturing."
Tesla CEO Elon Musk sent a company-wide email close to midnight on Sunday announcing the company was laying off "more than 10%" of the workforce, globally. He said in the memo that the job cuts were to prepare the firm for its "next phase of growth."
But some Tesla employees only found out when they arrived at work on Monday. As Business Insider's Grace Kay reported, security told some of the workers that if their ID badges didn't work, they were no longer employed.
The layoffs come after a difficult first quarter, which saw its sales drop 20% from the previous quarter.
Musk appears to be taking strategic actions to correct course. This includes quietly removing inventory discounts for its EVs in the US, as Tesla investor Sawyer Merritt noted on X.
Musk responded, "We are simplifying and streamlining the whole Tesla sales and delivery system. It has become complex and inefficient."
The Tesla chief is under pressure from investors as Wall Street "wants and NEEDS answers" next week on Tesla's investor conference call, Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said in a note Monday.
Ives said in the investors' call that Musk must present his "rationale for the cost-cutting, the strategy going forward, product roadmap, and an overall vision."
Musk announced his latest moonshot on X earlier this month and said Tesla would launch a self-driving taxi called "Robotaxi," which it would reveal on August 8.
In an X post on Tuesday night, he said he was "not quite betting the company" on autonomous driving, but that "going balls to the wall for autonomy is a blindingly obvious move."
Tesla didn't immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment made outside of normal working hours. Love could not be reached for comment.
Read the original article on Business Insider
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