Tesla conducting more layoffs, including entire Supercharger team
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I had built this whole E-Commerce platform for him and his company (I single-handedly did all the coding, infrastructure, etc. Not taking any credit for their incredible sales team.) that was running in multiple countries, bringing in millions in sales.
But I started getting pretty bored once it was stable enough and just running and started seeking greener pastures.
And he said (I'm paraphrasing) most people are either builders or maintainers, and rarely both. And he said I was a builder at heart. So I hate maintaining things. Which is why, when I helped hire my replacement, he was VERY much a maintainer, and he flourished in that second phase since it had reached maturity.
Using that framework, I think that the ratio of builders to maintainers at Tesla is not healthy right now. It seems VERY healthy at SpaceX, for example. They're innovating on new technology AND on efficiencies of the existing tech and logistics.
The builders got them to where they are (I'm still a generally happy Model 3 owner), but the maintainers are the ones who make the maintenance and service experience great, incrementally improve manufacturing, parts availability, all those unsexy things that have more to do with logistics, building superchargers etc.
Because they are too lopsided with builders, they keep inventing new stuff instead of continuing to innovate with EVs. For a while there were enough builder type challenges with manufacturing but even those challenges seem to be exhausted.
I'm surprised to see that they've gutted the supercharger team because it seems like the ultimate "services" sector where they're in better shape than anyone else to make basically free "services" type money from ALL EVs in coming years with NACS.
What really disturbs me about recent Tesla communication is that the Semi is just not being mentioned.
Tesla is basically a battery packager at its core business. The Tesla Semi represents a massive amount of demand for packaged batteries, and Tesla's model has the best prototype-demonstrated abilities. That is what the next ten years of the company is about at the core.
Elon needs to go. Give him the 56 billion, and then send him off his way to ruin Twitter which isn't important. Tesla is one of the most important companies in the world in terms of keeping the EV transition on the cutting edge and keeping the feet to the fire on the old ICE companies. Maybe the Chinese companies will take that up, but there is so much uncertainty in China now.
Tesla is taking too long to release models. It is NOT good at building. Their battery leadership is gone, CATL and other chinese companies raced past them.
The future of EVs is LFP and Sodium Ion, and then probably Li-S or Na-S. Tesla has no leadership in those, it's all China.
People are either Producer, Administrator, Entrepreneur, or Integrator.
It's a scale from E to P to I to A in order of early to late in the company lifecycle. There are even personality tests for this online.
The world will always ask commandos to stay around as soldiers and soldiers to stay around as police. But that’s not their role. They’re needed elsewhere.
I saw this with my own eyes back in college. A friend started a computing facility newsletter. Every Sunday he was up until dawn finishing the copy in it, and then Monday he would find a working printer and print copies. I think he was funding it himself for the first few months. One of the computing staff (the “student liaison”) fought him every step of the way. He was constantly being trouble, making it hard to distribute the newsletter. Telling him he couldn’t use the printer. Random stuff like that.
Well. My friend was reliable and 6 months passed. Every week the newsletter came out and it became part of life on campus. My friend moved on and guess who put up their hand to keep running it? It was the liaison. The same guy who had made it so hard to start in the first place. He’s just a born police man. I think deep down he loves maintaining the status quo. Once the newsletter was part of the status quo, he naturally took it on himself to keep it going.
Founders are good at founding, which is generally a very shortsighted and aggressive activity.
At some point, the business needs stability. Founders that stick around too long often cannot make that transition and end up making long term success untenable.
I’ve heard it called “Founder’s Syndrome” when a founder can’t bring themselves to step away and hand their creation off to a better caretaker.
[*] and more and more all the rest of them as well.
Tesla isn’t building a robot because a scrappy team in the company discovered an opportunity for innovation. They’re doing it because the CEO suddenly demanded it between doses of amphetamines.
Tesla would look like a big company with a startup mentality if they were pumping out new automotive products that made some level of sense.
Hyundai and Kia more closely resemble what this would look like in a large company. All their new cars have unique bespoke designs and a laser focus on giving customers a compelling offering in every category.
And in the context of this news I don't see much innovation just some cost-cutting to continue to prop up some moonshots to the detriment of the automaker portion of Tesla.
Would Optimus survive as its own startup ?
The answer is probably for big companies to let themselves get big but then start investing in the startup ecosystem. New things that aren't a good fit for BigCo should be done in actual startups.
I think trying to put everything under one umbrella is actively harmful. In its most extreme it gives you the Soviet politburo. I've speculated before that the real reason that capitalism seems to work better is because of this multiplicity of organizations allowing the system to route around dysfunction. When everything is all one big corporation (as it was in the USSR) dysfunction in any area becomes fatal and cannot be recovered from.
They aren’t at the point of disrupting themselves, this is like if Google terminated search in 2004. It’s idiotic, period.
But car sales are down across the entire market, this isn't exclusive to Tesla or EV's. Interest rates are just too high for your average consumers and discretionary spending continues to drop. It's myopic to think Tesla are doing something wrong without looking at the state of things.
Tesla is the perfect example of going corporate.
The ark is almost Shakespearean. Pioneering renegade builds an empire, lets it go to his head, and leads two thirds of it to ruin. I just hope spacex escapes the same fate.
I trust her, and think she’s a capable pair of hands.
Maybe I'm not understanding something here, but how does him getting the $56B not crash TSLA stock and the ultimately the company? AFAIKT TSLA has only made about $32B in profit during it's entire existence as a company (and that could be an overestimate - I don't think it accounts for earlier losses which would take it closer to $27B). So why should Musk get almost 2X that? Why would any shareholder (other than Musk) vote for this kind of payout?
The vote is basically on if the shareholders want to honor musks 2018-2022 comp package, which was recently thrown out.
The deal was that if Elon got the stock to 600 billion for shareholders, he got to keep 50 billion.
Public companies are strange creatures. You'd expect a company's valuation to be proportionally tied to its revenue and profit, but it rarely is and Tesla is an extreme case of this.
No, you'd expect it to be tied to the market's assessment of the company's total lifetime value. That will hopefully be informed by revenue and profit, but isn't limited to those, as disruptive companies might be round the corner about to wipe it out, or vice versa.
So this is beyond bonkers for me - literally about to hand cash over while holding my nose, but then they kill one of the major reasons I was willing to overlook Musks behavior?
Seriously, WTF is this guy on, and more importantly, how much? Nobody sober and sane would do this.
Yo do throw bossy tantrums that way. I mean, he flat out wrote he made an example of the sacked team:
> “Hopefully these actions are making it clear that we need to be absolutely hard-core about headcount and cost reduction,” he wrote in the email seen by The Information, which also announced the end of the public policy team led by departed executive Rohan Patel. “While some on exec staff are taking this seriously, most are not yet doing so.”
But sure, it was a planned move by a genius CEO.
The cheaper CT and whatever else he's promising will never see the light of day...
And he's delivered 36 of 100 Semis promised for 2017, and has basically implied there's little chance of that situation changing (blaming battery availability).
You picked my curiosity here. What exactly is there to patent here? AI training is being done a computer and that computer happen to be physically located inside a car. How do you patent the location of a computer?
Except Elon seems to have confused this with "driving innovation." The two __can__ correlate, but do not need to. Like I think it is fair to say that Tesla did push the other manufacturers to start pushing electric cars, but it is hard for me to argue that Tesla led the way through innovation. Not that they didn't do innovative stuff, but that the contribution here wasn't all that large.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/musk-d...
Presumably that was before Tesla needed to recall all the cybertrucks for stuck acceleration. AI says blame the floormats
His signature move.
I think it might be worth saying that:
1) Tesla has already accomplished its stated mission of making EV cars mainstream. This was Musk's goal from the beginning, and (insofar it is true that he's interested in working on "world changing problems" and not in making money per se) the mission of Tesla as a driver of transformation is accomplished.
2) Musk might have decided since a while that Tesla has a desperate need to pivot, because being a mass producer of a mature technology in the West is not sustainable in the long run.
Try planning a trip from Seattle to Madison, WI and let me know how normal that feels for you.
Try driving from Mt Shasta to Sacramento in 115 degree heat and see how many fast chargers are working on I-5
I don’t think I would call EVs mainstream until your average renter has access to a home charger. It simply will never be mainstream if people have to worry about when they’ll be able to get their next charge.
Something tells me there isn't a chance in hell of that happening.
Insanely wealthy person is not interested in “making money per se”?
Nobody amasses this wealth without being financially obsessed. No amount of ‘effective altruism’-esque “I need more money so I can do more amazing things” justifies it, especially when you put so much on the line to…buy a social network and as a vanity project.
Elon Musk is not a God.
I'm sorry just... what? Being in a position to sell products to a robust and demanding market is a bad thing? What in the Business Major brain are we saying here?
And frankly calling their products "mature technology" feels like a stretch given Tesla is regularly stubbing it's toe on pretty benign design problems that numerous other automakers have had nailed down for decades.
Optimistic about your equity you invested or the problems they are working on? I mean equity been overstated for awhile - but that's the Musk effect. However Tesla is still far ahead of the competition - I see more Teslas coming on the roads around here then any other EV (not as many cybertrucks though).
Because we can't buy vehicles from the Chinese competition.
>However Tesla is still far ahead of the competition
Are they?
Did anyone catch the recent All In Podcast? They were talking about Tesla's robotaxi lead, so Calacanis showed them a video of Waymo operating robotaxis today and Chamath and Sacks had literally never seen it before; "This is amazing!".
Pretty easy to believe Tesla is the leader when you don't know what's out there.
FYI - because Chamath and Sacks haven't heard of Waymo operating robo taxis before (which is mind-blowing that they didn't know that considering a good portion of their job is an alternative take on the news) does not mean the rest of the world doesn't.
Tesla is indeed way ahead on self-driving.
In terms of Chinese EVs - that will certainly bring in a lot more competition but they aren't the same class of vehicles. It's like comparing fiat 500 and an audi a6.
... Why on earth would anyone listen to this? I mean, based on this, it's people who don't know even the very basics of the market talking about it anyway.
(I'm still struggling with the idea of _Jason Calacanis_ being the voice of reason, in any context...)
Model Y: 1.23 M Rav 4: 1.07 M Corolla: 1.01 M
https://www.best-selling-cars.com/brands/2023-full-year-glob...
https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/26/23738581/tesla-model-y-ev...
And he has to make this gamble because Tesla's fundamentals as a car company is going down the drain and its entire valuation hinges on the fact that they are not just a car company. That's why he's constantly announcing new products (robotaxis, humanoid robots) that are nowhere close to materializing, making visits to China to ink HD maps deal with Baidu for FSD and claiming to spend $10B on AI infrastructure this year.
He seems to be in forever stock pump mode, so much so that Tesla's best product till date might just be its stock.
A lot of companies seem to be gutting everything to the point where their only product is their stock.
The problem is, while that worked well for a good 10 or 20 years, it seems that people are now starting to catch on to the scheme. But I'm not sure that means that you can just stop doing it. As someone elsewhere in the thread pointed out, dragging things out as much as you can is probably preferable to a sudden and brutal value correction for just about everyone with actual skin in the game.
Doesn't answer your problem issue - though the real dollar cost of investment and training is lower.
That's about it.
Security fraud.
Hasn't Uber been waiting for the same thing to save it?
Also, after work on the Model 2 was canceled and reopened, I can't see Daniel Ho and his teams departure as a long-considered choice, to put it mildly.
Feels all like emotionally driven decisions...
I’m not saying he is correct by the way, just that it seems like he thinks that and it basically explains his behavior.
To build and run a charger network you need people for at least these things:
• To design the stations (including the charging equipment (hardware and software), landscaping, buildings)
• To manufacture the charging equipment
• To decide at a high level were to put stations, and at a lower level to find specific sites, buy or lease those sites, and go through whatever legal process is needed to be allowed to build there.
• To deal with electric utilities to get power to the site.
• To do the actual building at the site, including preparing the land, maybe paving, installing the chargers, hooking up to the incoming power, putting up signage, etc
• To maintain it. It will need regular cleaning and trash pickup. Someone should be checking regularly for problems that won't be found by whatever remote monitoring and diagnostics they have. When a problem is found, manually or by there remote monitoring, someone has to go fix it.
• To provide customer support.
If you do all of them in house you need a large team. But a lot of them are reasonably done by hiring another company to do them in which case you might not need a large in house team.
I'd guess that they do the first (design), part of the second (assemble the charging equipment from components they have custom built by other companies), the high level location planning.
I'd guess that the lower level part of site placement is done by local firms familiar with the area that Tesla hires, that dealing with the electric company and the actual building is done by a local general contractor and whatever subcontractors that general contractor uses.
I'd guess that the cleaning and on site checking for problems is handled by a local maintenance company. Fixing problems would either be a local company or someone Tesla sends depending on what it is that needs fixing.
Customer support would likely be Tesla.
If Tesla considers that their existing Supercharger station designs are good enough to continue using for a long time for new stations, then they might really only need to keep in house the high level decision of were to put them, charger repairs, customer support, and hiring the local companies that do the field work.
Everyone (even the most strident Tesla haters) agrees that SC is the one thing Tesla does the best, hands down. I own a model Y and tried to use only non-Tesla charging on a long distance trip a few months ago, it was a disaster.
Telsa's charging network is a win on EVERY front:
1. Locations 2. Quantity of locations 3. Quality (high charging rates) 4. User experience / design of hardware - software 5. Realtime reporting and navigation 6. Uptime of network
The SC network is why a lot people consider Tesla who otherwise it would be a big fat no.
Yep. This is why a CEO actually matters. Musk is a great example of what happens when a CEO is bad. He's turning into John Scully for those of you that remember. Unfortunately he's no Steve Jobs, but the board definitely needs to find a CEO, stat or that ship's going down.
Even if that makes some sense, it seems early to make that judgment call.
Maybe this isn't actually what's going on, but from an outsider's perspective, it really feels to me like watching a person's nervous breakdown play out, but at the scale of giant publicly traded companies.
Musk is detached from reality. He seems to think firing most of X is a resounding success and Tesla, a car manufacturing company, needs to do the same. Also that cost cutting and performance reviews only apply to others, just like in Twitter and elsewhere free speech means his speech not critics.
I really hope he doesn’t wreck spaceX too.
Case in point is AWS. I've been reading they are a PIP factory for the last couple of years. Doesn't seem like they have a major issue hiring (partly due to lack of a competitor who is doing better).
investors buy stocks.
customers buy cars.
silicon valley's product is stock.
Also that amount was from a contract made in 2018.
I think SpaceX is one disaster away from suffering the same fate, to be honest. Like, if the next Starship doesn't make it as far as the previous attempt (for example, if it blows up on the way up), Elon is going to come in like a wrecking ball.
The pressure on the SpaceX team must be immense.
Meaning that, like for Elon's other companies, they might be in an incredibly vulnerable position, financially speaking. A disaster could sink the company. But simply failing to have some of these risky bets pay off could be just as damaging. For example, even if everything in the plan works on a technical level, if there isn't enough demand for Starlink's service to support the whole Starlink 2 project then that might turn the entire Starlink 2 project, including the Starship rocket they need to launch these larger satellites, into a big money loser.
Not entirely unlike how we're seeing signs that Tesla may not be a sustainable business, not necessarily because of anything fundamentally wrong with their core business, but because they made some over-aggressive assumptions about how many golden eggs their goose would lay.
That's over $30,000 for every single car Tesla sold in 2023.
It's a weird situation. It sounds like an unconscionable amount now only because of Musk's success in raising the stock value. Like he's being paid too much because he was too successful.
I'm not a direct shareholder, but if the Deleware court gives me an option not to pay $55 Billion that I thought was committed, I'd strongly consider.
What are the implications of not approving? On the plus side, the company keeps the compensation. On the minus side, Musk will be upset; and there's a trust issue for future compensation. On the neutral side, those receiving future compensation will endeavour to follow an approval process that is likely to stand up in court.
We don't really need Tesla or Twitter/X. But we really do need SpaceX. He's already moved it to Texas to shield himself from lawsuits, so I wouldn't count on it surviving intact.
why?
The alleged money he asks for does not exist, it is just shares in Tesla, which are currently owned by the company. It's bizarre how misinformed these Journalists are, the real story is far more interesting then just Musk being greedy.
The takeaway for me is that as a fundraiser and hype man, before he ruined his reputation, he was pretty successful, but in all other ways he's a massive self-promoting hack.
The hagification of Musk in the press was on another level, like Steve Jobs, DaVinci and Obama rolled together. That this carefully crafted illusion is falling apart due to his online ramblings and bizarre business decisions is something worthy of study. He and Kanye West share a very similar trajectory in this regard.
I don't think you've ever seen anyone with ketamine habit (keywords: UK k-hole).
Pretty stupid thing to say about someone who has medical prescription for ketamine to treat depression while they work 100hrs per week.
Musk is arguing that paying him $55B to pump the stock price is better than paying those employees for 40 years.
If you're a shareholder that only cares about the stock price and not the underlying value of the company - that's a decent argument.
I wouldn't buy it. But maybe the shareholders will.
Don’t think so, it’s just that he’s focused on another reality - losing the crown of the richest person in the world. And, he’s doing everything to keep that crown, everything else be dammed.
Isn’t it? I use X every day and it seems to be fine now and getting better on a good cadence.
Last I heard he's hemorrhaging paying customers (advertisers) who while publicly say it has to do with <insert popular issue>; privately say it has to do with worsening ROI (targeting).
What often happens is a rewrite that keeps the same mistakes as the original product (either organizational, specification wise or technical).
I have no idea about management, I just constantly see restructurings of departments going wrong.
So I think it may not be as crazy as you make out. On the other hand were they really underperforming? Isn't Tesla's charging network still world leading?
He did this with Starlink. One day he wasn't happy with how fast Starlink was progressing and so he went up to Seattle, fired the entire team and started over. That led to the Starlink we have now. I have spoken directly with employees there and they totally believe in the mission more than anything and they want to only work with other A players. Again, I am amazed that Musk manages to keep attracting top tier people to kill themselves over his vision but i'm not an A player so what do I know.
Supercharger rollout wasn't slow. They have been averaging more than one new station opened per day in the US alone. If a new gas station brand were opening 30+ new gas stations per month in the US I think we'd find that impressive.
1 super charger station per day is pitiful, you don’t need to be Elon to realize that is nowhere near fast enough to transition to electric vehicles.
Oh, yes, that 1M strong self-driving taxi network promised to be delivered in 2019 is rolling out really well.
As is the Cybertruck, robots, and AI.
The supercharger network is arguably the most successful Tesla product.
It's mostly a problem with getting permits and connections to the power grid, but still it's not a great performance. I don't know if they could do better.
I wonder where they'll find people at this point that haven't heard the news that the entire organization can be fired on a whim?
What experienced capable person would want to go to that new team? Unless the pay is far far above market, it's not attractive.
That, or he erratically makes decisions on a whim. Depends on how charitable your reading is.
> Elon generally does not fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy.
Did you see the news a few years ago when he bought a media company for $44 B and drove its profits into the ground?
What amazes me the most is that absolutely loyal cult following this guy has built. For decades Apple fans were mocked relentlessly for the adoration of Jobs. Now that cult has moved on over to Musk. Different people but same worship.
Maybe he meant in the short term, but I would expect a different kind of bluster if what you said was true.
Supercharging network is essentially complete from a fundamentals perspective, you can nearly go anywhere with a EV with a bit of planning. The market can fill in the gaps.
The roadster and semi situations are headscratchers, but I guess Tesla doesn’t want to hassle with a “sports car” with the same performance as its biggest sedan. I don’t think the Semi really works purely from an energy density perspective. Diesel-electric hybrids make far more sense for big rigs for current battery tech. The Tesla semi is sorta stuck.
The layoffs make sense in that light. They have implemented the step change in Ev Manufacturing, built the machine to build the machines, are very close with FSD, built the charging network… working to avoid innovators dilemma, perhaps?
Treating employees poorly is no good.
The “electrify road shipping” would go a lot smoother if Tesla was honest about “electric performance + a diesel base load” but I guess Elon doesn’t want to concede the argument? Honestly surprised no one else has moved in this space?? Maybe it just doesn’t work?
(To the tune of "Tomorrow" from Annie.)
For anyone curious, this will be SAE J3400 when finalized:
* https://www.sae.org/standards/content/j3400/
* https://driveelectric.gov/charging-connector
Previously the open standard was SAE J1772 / IEC 62196 Type 2:
What's happening in North America is that everyone will use CCS with Tesla's plug on the end. It's CCS type 3.
Older Teslas will need a retrofit to be able to talk CCS. Tesla chargers will still support Tesla's now dead protocol.
Surely the superchargers can be made to be self sufficient with rates and advertising etc.
Essentially the ploy was for Tesla to use the charging network as a loss leader to make Tesla the only/most viable EV brand, and because both roads and electricity grids are well regulated utilities that failed so from here on the only source of money for Tesla is going to be the company revenue/profit, as it's phase as a buy an monopoly startup is over.
I’m interested to know how many other HNers also hold this belief, or think this is a reasonable way to treat entrepreneurs in America?
I think it’s reasonable not to allow a single employee to be compensated (55b$) more than all the EBITDA the company has ever made.
I think it’s reasonable to question the decision making demonstrated by firing the most successful team at the company and put the major competitive advantage at risk.
I think it’s reasonable to question the constant monkeying with product and design (Cybertruck, removal of loved features like LIDAR or physical wiper blade controls).
I think it’s reasonable to question how the CEO has lost first mover advantage so badly by failing to improve products and introduce new models as the legacy competition and foreign companies quickly have caught up.
I think it’s reasonable to want an engaged, full-time CEO who is not distracted by executive responsibilities at several other ventures, half of which are actively failing as well.
Put another way, sure, the stock price went above the targets he set for himself. How much did profits go up?
That company no longer exists.
My immediate thought was that he sees that Tesla's Supercharger advantage is not going to improve enough to justify the large team. And the experience for Tesla owners is still likely to improve over time, even if Tesla is not expanding at the same rate: even though gas cars still rule, EVs now have a significant foothold, and the rate of 3rd party charger installations will continue to accelerate.
He also said they will continue to expand existing locations and will continue with installs at a slower rate. So that means either he didn't fire everyone or he has replacements in mind.
That's just my guess though, and in addition to my guess likely being flawed, the hypothetical rationale could be flawed too.
What you said about government decisions could be important too, but it seems strange to make such a drastic decision based on potential government action, especially with an election coming up that could turn the tables.
If you ask me it's a temporary cost cutting. When interest rates come down, car sales pick up and revenues pick up, they'll re-start the build out of the network.
Moreover, EVs are going to just keep growing in number. Every brand now has a pretty solid EV for sale. Keeping the same number of chargers isn't helping anyone.
It's their right, but my main point is that this just further convinces me Tesla isn't serious about keeping up with EVs. Pumping money into a useless truck, chasing a dozen other fanciful projects, abandoning their world class charger network. The future is -- every other manufacturer -- it would seem.
Opening the chargers up to other brands leads to an influx of more cars wanting to charge at locations that won't be growing anymore. Anyone can do the math to figure out what that'll do to the EV ecosystem.
2019: Buys a Model 3 Performance I love this car, though I wish Elon Musk would stop over-promising on FSD. I hope one day to get a Roadster 2.0!
2021: Elon is becoming a bit of a nut job, but his large presence in the news is good for Tesla sales.
2024: The absolute best thing Tesla could possibly do for the survival of the brand is to get rid of Elon Musk. His hard right-wing shift has destroyed left-wing environmentalist desires to get a Tesla, and if Tesla dies, the entire market takes it as a signal that EVs are not viable in the market. His claims on FSD "coming soon" are no longer forgivable and are just outright lies. No longer interested in the Roadster 2.0, hoping someone else can make an EV convertible that'll do 0-60 in under 2.2s and have a $200K or less price tag.
I told him this Musk fellow doesn't inspire much confidence in me with his increasingly bizarre antics.
Seems like I dodged a bullet.
Ok, I'm interested in the rebuttals from the "Elon knows better than you, as measured by his net worth" perspective. It might be really clever business, or it might be a spasm. Is this just an HR maneuver to weed out the less-than-fully-committed?
I think its even more whimsical to expect the government to step in and force your employer to continue employing you if they dont want to.
In the US it seems like you can let people go for at moments notice with little process - in the UK that looks like what we would call “being fired” generally for cause.
“In United States labor law, at-will employment is an employer's ability to dismiss an employee for any reason (that is, without having to establish "just cause" for termination), and without warning, as long as the reason is not illegal (e.g. firing because of the employee's gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, or disability status). When an employee is acknowledged as being hired "at will", courts deny the employee any claim for loss resulting from the dismissal. The rule is justified by its proponents on the basis that an employee may be similarly entitled to leave their job without reason or warning. The practice is seen as unjust by those who view the employment relationship as characterized by inequality of bargaining power.
[…]
The doctrine of at-will employment can be overridden by an express contract or civil service statutes (in the case of government employees). As many as 34% of all U.S. employees apparently enjoy the protection of some kind of "just cause" or objectively reasonable requirement for termination that takes them out of the pure "at-will" category, including the 7.5% of unionized private-sector workers, the 0.8% of nonunion private-sector workers protected by union contracts, the 15% of nonunion private-sector workers with individual express contracts that override the at-will doctrine, and the 16% of the total workforce who enjoy civil service protections as public-sector employees.”
The "oh you weren't fired, you were laid off" line is manufactured by HR and is meaningless. If you come in to work one day and your boss decides they don't like the color of your shirt and shows you the door, were you fired or "laid off"?
zorg_fire_one_million_meme.gif
Laid Off = You were let go for things outside your control (company downsizing, etc)
Laid off means the role won’t be backfilled. It could also mean the role was renamed, and they wanted to let the employee go but it looks better for everyone to say it was a layoff.
Let go (at least to me) could mean either.
I don't care about Musk's politics (everyone has skeletons in their closet, so idgaf) but I don't have confidence as a customer anymore now that Tesla has truly become erratic recently.
The only reason I even seriously considered a Tesla is the supercharger network.
I don't want to have a Daewoo Motors 2.0 on my hands.
Depends on the reasons for it. If their performance is low why not lay them off?
Why? They already have the largest network in the industry. And whatever the news says, they not gone fire everybody involved and stop making more superchargers.
However, this is the ChargePoint model having 3rd parties buy/build/own/operate the stations and although Tesla's DC/AC charger builds are better, they will be confronted with the same issues ChargePoint has where station uptime is much lower due under 3rd party ownership because Tesla does not directly own and monitor the stations and it's up to the owner to maintain. The owners are more lax and the ports experience more downtime, disrepair. Literally the opposite of increasing SC uptime that was Elon's justification tweet on this team layoff. Maybe they can find a solution to the problem (only selling to large orgs/projects like they do with Megapack) but the likely outcome is the network will grow slower with outside capital but the quality/uptime is lower than before. And non Tesla SC stations/networks will be integrated into the Tesla dash like everyone other OEM does.
I'm not sure Musk passes that test.
So probably individual losses on their books that they no longer need to underwrite because the competition can start investing and operating them which expands the network for users.
Seriously, whats different this time?
You can free-float X to a certain extent, just make sure neither users nor advertisers run away. If you are building cars and a model completely falls flat you are easily down billions of dollars.
Prev I thought good leaders don't matter (and musk is still bat shit crazy) but plenty of times now I took care of stuff (a team, a product) and made it good.
But keeping it good needs still attention or someone taking over.
That Elon was/is hands on was.critical.
With him spending time on Twitter too, stupidest thing he ever did.
I wonder if Tesla is in any breaches of contracts that they may have signed with these companies, and how much Ford/Rivian paid for acccess.
https://x.com/fomahun/status/1785333618157527081?s=46&t=LAqP...
Here's one charging a BMW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y33AArvMUQ
Another BMW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mox4tL3dR8o
Here's one charging a 400 volt Kia: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/yflZN0dLT8s
Here's one not doing a good job charging an 800 volt Kia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEJ2KtzMeh8
Tesla does need to do better on 800 volt charging. If Alpitronic, Kempower, ABB, EvBox, and friends can all do it then Tesla can do it too.
I think all of the V3/V4 superchargers are open to all cars, otherwise Tesla wouldn't get government funding for expanding the charging network (at least in the EU, maybe UK changed that after brexit).
Interestingly it's still mostly teslas charging there, although superchargers are one of the cheapest options to charge.
Being fired means your employer was unsatisfied with employing you, reasons can include insufficient performance, inappropriate conduct, breach of contract, and so on.
Being laid off means your employer no longer needs or wants your manhours, with no negativity otherwise implied. Reasons can include corporate restructurings and so on.
Plus most layoffs are also taking performance into account. If every department is tasked with cutting headcount by 10%, they aren't going to pull the numbers out of a hat. The lowest performers will be the ones shown the door.
I conjecture that technology-giant Musk firing political-opinionator Musk would be a winning brand management pivot for all his concerns, not just Tesla.
Investors might also appreciate the reduction in Musk's attention burn rate.
If he announced it like that, in all good humor, and followed through, I would expect significant share price bumps.
(I have belatedly become less of an advocate for Tesla, since Musk entered the arena for loud mouth battles over zero/negative-sum ideas. I also attribute part of my decision to pass on Cybertruck to that effect. Divisiveness does nothing for a high-visibility statement product for which "cool" and "I like Elon Musk" are inextricable selling points.)
I doubt Tesla is going to abandon Superchargers anytime soon.
(Sorry, I'll show myself out the door.)
The long-term cost of treating longtime, loyal, talented employees like Rebecca Tinucci as... disposable could be very high.
It could even threaten the company's survival.
But... I'm going to give Musk the benefit of the doubt, because he has proven me -- and lots of people who are way smarter than me -- wrong, again and again, over the past two decades. He has a long track record of making bets that look crazy-stupid in the moment but turn out to be crazy-brilliant in hindsight.
The jury is out.
Like Cybertruck?
Tesla Semi?
Full self driving in 2017?
Robotic snake to automatically plug into your car and charge it?
Dojo?
Hyperloop?
Solar roofs?
Battery Swap?
Dogecoin?
Tesla Roadster?
Twitter?
Here are some counter-examples:
* A new car company making a new kind of vehicle. The first time I heard he wanted to build a new car company that would sell EVs, I dismissed it as crazy. Tesla now sells close to 2M vehicles a year, roughly comparable to BMW.
* A new network of EV charging stations. The first time I heard about it I thought the company would never recoup the capital cost.
* A new rocket company. The first time I heard about SpaceX's early days I dismissed it as crazy. SpaceX now sends 10x more cargo to orbit than everyone else, public and private, combined.
* A new satellite-Internet service. Prior to Starlink, every previous attempt to offer cheap and reliable Internet service via satellite had gone bankrupt.
* A new brain-machine interface. The first time I heard about Neuralink I dismissed it as "way too early." The company just showed a disabled man using a computer with his thoughts.
* The latest beta version of the self-driving software (FSD Beta >= 12.3.6). I've tested it and I am... impressed. Even though it happened much later than Musk predicted. Here's what it's like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIjOs1Gum2M
* Dojo, which is now online. There's a picture of it on the last quarterly deck: https://digitalassets.tesla.com/tesla-contents/image/upload/... -- though I don't know if it will be able to keep up with Nvidia's offerings, which are always improving.
Some things you mention failed, and the jury is still out on Cybertruck, Roadster, Solar Roof, and X (Twitter).
But the track record is there.
Apparently there was an increased credit available for EVs that could be fully charged in under x-time and by claiming that they could battery swap tesla got a bunch of extra money.
It was when he tried to pass that one off with a straight face that drove the final nail into the coffin containing any delusions I may have entertained about Elon's competence.
SpaceX and Tesla are very likely his biggest successes, by all measures of the word. The amount of success these obtained easily tower over the failures by several orders of magnitude.
They didn't commercialize it because no one else was capable of making one and it was too much work for one person to mass produce
You rarely see any evidence that Elon does anything but pay (...sometimes...), threaten and scare people into delivering on his demands
Everything is about first principles. You know, the most basic simple starting blocks. They teach it to high school kids. People act like that's magic....
Enron got away with as much as they did because of the far more generous accounting rules that were in play back then.
It's like some kind of twisted Hot Hand fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_hand) that bends in on itself actually making it not a fallacy if everyone believes it.
How exactly does making the Tesla charging infrastructure system open for other car manufacturers “nationalize” the network?
Network still owned and managed by private company. Private company has still manages day to day maintenance. Maybe private company gets a small kickback in return or tax deduction? But this is far from a nationalization of a privately owned infrastructure.
Looking of the popular VOD service, I see Tesla offers membership for non-Tesla owners and they can pay the membership fee or the market price at point of sale.
Mandatory interop is not nationalization. Words have specific meanings.
As far as I can tell there have been zero calls to nationalize the Supercharger network from anyone.
No.
Nationalize: To convert from private to governmental ownership and control.
How hard can this be pushed? Tesla put in all the work, took all the risk, and now they can be forced to share it and give up one of their competitive advantages? Maybe in Europe, but it doesn't seem like a U.S. kind of move, where normally you put in the work and risk, you reap the rewards rather than being forced to hand over what you've earned to the competitors.
Beyond that, the “pressure” for interoperability has entirely been tied to federal funding. The feds have money available to build electric charging stations, but the catch is that it has to work with cars from other manufacturers. If you don’t take the money, you can do whatever you want
Musk makes no secret about how he feels people should be having more children, but at the same time he runs his companies in a way that makes it hard for people to prioritize their families. He intentionally pressures his teams to choose his business over the families that he insists people have.