Tesla has laid off its charging team in a new round of layoffs even as it recently won over major automakers like Ford and General Motors and made its plug the de facto standard in North America.
CEO Elon Musk announced the new layoffs in a late-night email to executives that was first reported by The Information. In it, he said he wanted executives to be “absolutely tough on headcount and cost cutting” and ordered them to cut more employees who “obviously don’t pass the excellent, necessary and trustworthy test” or resign. According to The Information, Rebecca Tinucci, senior director of EV charging, and Daniel Ho, head of new vehicles, are no longer there.
Tesla’s Supercharger network has long been considered one of Tesla’s greatest competitive advantages. It is widely used, has far better uptime than other charging networks, and the connection technology – known as the North American Charging Standard (NACS) – is now adopted by virtually every major automaker with a presence in North America.
Will Jameson, one of the loading team leaders, let go in the cuts, said in a post on Musk’s social media platform
“I don’t yet know what this means for the charging network, NACS and all the exciting work we’ve done across the industry. What a wild ride this has been,” he wrote.
The cuts are so extensive that Musk even suggested in the email that the company would slow the expansion of the Supercharger network, writing that Tesla “will continue to build some new Supercharger locations where they are critical, and will complete those currently under construction.”
According to the reports, Musk is also disbanding Tesla’s public policy team. Rohan Patel, the former vice president of that team, left the company two weeks ago, at the same time as the layoffs were announced. Patel called it the “best policy/bizdev team in the industry” in a message to TechCrunch at the time. “I know I’m extremely biased, but honestly the people on my team are phenomenal,” he wrote.
Tesla’s policy team is largely responsible for ensuring the company receives about 13% of available funding from the bipartisan infrastructure bill, and until recently was seeking another nearly $100 million in federal grant funding to build a charging corridor for to finance the company’s large electrical appliance, which is still under development.
These cuts come just two weeks after Musk announced that Tesla would lay off more than 10% of its workforce as part of a company-wide restructuring to “work aggressively on autonomy.” The company has had a brutal first quarter. Its profits fell 55% due to weaker electric vehicle sales. At the same time, the company’s board is trying to reinstate Musk’s $56 billion pay package, which was rejected by a judge, and the CEO has publicly threatened to develop AI technology at his startup xAI unless he does gets even more control over Tesla.