Musk Reportedly Fired Tesla's Entire Supercharger Team Because Charging Chief Didn't Want To Fire More People
- by Jalopnik
- May 15, 2024
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What is Elon Musk praying about here? Wrong answers only.
Photo: Apu Gomes / Stringer (Getty Images) And yet, in addition to canceling four planned Supercharger sites in New York
, Tesla’s global supply manager recently sent an email to contractors and suppliers — and seen by Reuters — telling them to “please hold on breaking ground on any newly awarded construction projects.” It also included the line, “I understand that this period of change may be challenging, and that patience is not easy when expecting to be paid!”
With the Supercharger team gone, Tesla brought in the energy team to take over and handle winding down various charging projects. They also apparently received little retraining to ensure they could do their jobs well, with one contractor saying the Tesla employees he’s spoken with since the mass firing “don’t know a thing.”
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According to two former employees, Tesla’s energy division, which sells solar systems and battery storage were already struggling to handle their workload before they were forced to take on the Supercharger team’s workload. So it came as a surprise when Musk later said Tesla “still plans to grow the Supercharger network, just at a slower pace,” and claimed that “Tesla will spend well over $500M expanding our Supercharger network to create thousands of NEW chargers this year.”
While $500 million is certainly a lot of money, it also reportedly much lower than what the team had planned to invest in chargers, with one estimate suggesting a 77 percent decrease in the number of Superchargers that Tesla was planning to build in 2024. Still, overseeing the installation of those charging hubs will likely require a team of several hundred employees that Tesla no longer has in place.
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The layoffs also affect contractors that brought on employees of their own and budgeted for the year based on agreements with Tesla. Musk’s decision to get rid of the Supercharging team and cut back on Supercharger expansion hurts those companies, too. “It’s just unfortunate that now they’re stuck holding the bag on all these different projects,” one former employee told Reuters. “It’s really sad to see all these relationships burned and people be really angry —rightfully so.”
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