What’s Going on At Tesla?

Elon Musk is either an evil genius or just plain evi..interesting. Just plain interesting is definitely what I was going to say.

There’s a lot going on over at Tesla HQ. They had to recall all of the Cybertrucks ever created because of an issue with the brake pedal that can cause the truck to accelerate rapidly. Yikes!

Most recently, company founder Elon Musk took the term big chop to a whole new level! He fired the entire supercharger network team of over 500 employees.

And that was less than two weeks after he laid off some 14,000 people.  That’s a whole 10% of the company’s workforce!

The Supercharger Network is Tesla’s EV charging infrastructure. Just a few weeks ago, the company announced plans to expand the charging network across North America. It was going to become the default charging station for all EVs. They even opened up access to other companies. 

General Motors and Ford said they planned to use Tesla’s charging station for their EVs. Tesla had also just accepted US$17 million in EV charging grants from the Federal Government. So, it seemed like a lot of resources were being poured into this area of the business. 

Until… Musk abruptly fired the whole team.

He said the company still plans to grow the Supercharger network, just at a much slower pace for new locations. The focus now is on maintaining and expanding current locations. But that’s kinda hard to do when you fire your whole team. 

Now, the official explanation behind the sudden firing is that they need to cut costs.  But some analysts have said that the real reason is that Musk no longer sees the charging network as the company’s golden goose. 

We’ve talked about the general slowdown in the EV market.  Customers just aren’t feeling it that much.  And ironically, one of customers’ main concerns was charging infrastructure. Plus, since they opened up the charging network to other companies, they’ll be helping their competitors by investing in building out the charging network. 

So bye bye employees, I guess.

Tesla is now turning its attention to its self-driving software and China. They were just given approval from Chinese regulators to install their “supervised Full-Self Driving” AI tech on Chinese vehicles.

This is a big deal for them. China is a large market for EVs so if this team doesn’t get fired too, then it could be big business for Tesla.

The company’s stock price has been kinda up and down with all this mixed news, dipping down to US$142 at the end of April. But it’s rebounded to US$183 as I record this on May 6.

And that’s the bottom line.