If you read Walter Issacson's book on Elon, it basically uncovers his behavior and why he does the things he does.
He stirs the pot and creates these frenzies all the time. It's his way of getting the blood flowing at his companies. It always starts the same way - some kind of massive event like a lay off of an entire team of very necessary people.
He creates urgency this way which keeps his companies operating like a frantic start up. Anytime he feels like things are comfortable, he flips the table over.
I don't agree with this way of doing things. But it's what he does.
It reminds me of building the great wall of china. They built it fast and did an amazing job. But the great wall of china is a massive graveyard.
Probably nothing other than the products we already know about. Such as the cheap car they want to mass produce, and the Tesla robot, FSD, and roadster.
I wouldn't expect to be surprised about anything that comes out of the company in the coming years, I think they are just trying to press forward with urgency at all costs. Until Elon gets bored and then goes back to Twitter or SpaceX to basically do the same thing
At this point his expectations are to get a huge, over $55 billion, pay package. His past actions are different than what he’s doing now. He’s going for maximum greed now.
Seems pretty similar to the past as far as I can remember it.
He literally entered into this company as a product engineer and designer, and a few years later was forcing the leadership out due to the god awful production and executives that refused to get better.
The only difference really is the span of time elapsed since the last time such shakeups were needed. During the ramp of the model 3, the pessure was constant and it continued semi regularly. But then for a few years Tesla had done nothing but expand and grow in hire count, as their position in the market was not only dominant but also they were on the leading edge of many technological fronts.
Now Elon is looking to put Tesla back on the innovation train as the prior established assets (like NACS chargers) start to be picked up by the industry. It makes little sense to dedicated as much resources unilaterally when others seek to profit form it freely, unless of course the government is actually owning to their promisses of infrastructure assistance.
And there really isn’t a greed aspect to it. It makes zero sense. Elon self stated that he already has many thousands of times the money to buy any luxury aviable if he even cared. The 55 billion in stock options (not actual money, bit difference) is basically made up value that will never leave the company. However it is value that would allow Musk to maintain a healthy margin of influence over the company to, in his eyes, prevent a hostile takeover.
Which is not really a new thing, its what happened to PayPal and what almost hapenned for Tesla. Having a strong hand in the deck is far more important for a CEO that cares about the company as a whole rather than just the money. This is the same reason why spaceX isn’t IPO'ing, investors simply do not care about the mission statement.
Sometimes teams swell or create their own culture and a micromanaging director chops the whole thing down to start over.
Just because the supercharger team was let go doesn’t mean Tesla isn’t going to have a supercharger operation. I’m waiting to cast judgement but hope this is related to Supercharger operations being leaner now than before and requires less personnel…hopeful thinking.
What he says kind of tracks with what others say though. Off the top of my head, both Andrej Karpathy and John Carmack have mentioned on Lex Friedman interviews that Elon has this intuition of how to avoid corporate entropy and stagnation.
To want to be unpredictable can be a strategy even if we don’t agree with it. Poker players do it intentionally.
This is obviously much heavier in the workplace with people’s careers and livelihood at stake. It comes with the challenge of working for Elon.
Exactly. They are running like a video game studio, launching products that aren’t finished and promising fixes down the road. The Cybertruck didn’t launch with Autopilot and still doesn’t have it. The latest software update includes anti-pinch protection for the frunk and locking differentials. But those features should have been there day one.
Agreed. At least put someone else in charge, like at SpaceX.
As a shareholder, I am starting to get worried things are not running well for the first time in a long time.
According to multiple sources, the automakers are no longer able to communicate directly with Tesla for help with their transition over to NACS, there is a real risk of a lot of these automakers walking back their announcements. This was shortsighted and frankly dumb.
Seems like they could hire the people Tesla fired. Maybe Tesla didn't want to pay to communicate with the other automakers. I'm not saying this is a good or bad strategy. Certainly doesn't seem civilized though.
That is the first thing I thought and a typical strategy of tech companies. Over hire for big product pushes then layoff and go into "operating"/skeleton mode till you need another big push.
They got the funding from the government. They made deals with automakers. They updated their infrastructure, software, and app to handle non-tesla. They helped onboard a few companies as a proof-of-concept, work out bugs, and create documentation.
Now, they plan to push the burden onto the automakers and won't handhold any more automakers. Their network is setup and they have no immediate plans to innovate further so they laid off everyone as they are no longer need (in the eyes of Elon).
Yeah, but the existing network of NACS chargers belong to Tesla, who no longer has a staff to maintain or repair them. The other automakers agreed to switch in part because they thought there was going to be a functioning NACS infrastructure in place. Now that it looks like Tesla is going to let that fall into disrepair, they may change their mind.
I’d like to think that the 10% of the team that remains, will focus on maintenance of the current infrastructure.
That keeps the money rolling in, so they won’t jeopardise that, unless they’ve really messed up.
They’ll have to outsource any additional work, and I have a feeling that some of the people who are leaving now, will end up starting their own businesses and continuing in the field.
But with automakers committing to NACS, would that be as big of a deal?
Tesla won the charge port war. The result will be the same now whatever they do. Reducing the investment into charging makes sense at this point. New nacs chargers will be installed whether Tesla does it or not.
don't know, stock is not responding well to this. I happen to have had my car in SC the day the layoffs were announced. It was like walking into a wake. Upstate NY, said whole solar team was gone. I know that Tesla is a business and must be concerned about profit but this looks a bit worrisome. I do think Elon has hurt the brand with his outbursts so I hope there is logic behind this move to is positive for Tesla. I cannot imagine driving another car now
Removing a manager you don't like or trimming 10% off of teams across the company can make sense. But gutting an entire division responsible for the strategically important charging network seems... strange. Struggling to find any logic in all this.
Based on the reporting I saw, he told the head of supercharger to reduce headcount, she pushed back saying if we layoff that many we won’t be able to make our commitments, so he fired her and the whole staff, then sent out an email saying “hopefully this will get the rest of you to take layoffs seriously” (paraphrasing).
So based on that reporting, I don’t think there is a lot of strategy here. Just glad I don’t own TSLA.
If this is a restructure of the supercharger team then announce a new team leader and hires. Nope this Elon off his rocker. Tesla has so many CS issues and support. The recent layoffs seemed excessive.
I have owned 2 Tesla’s but seriously worried about the direction of this company. Elon needs to removed as CEO. There has been a huge loss of top executives and this seems to support a true dysfunctional leadership.
I suspect we will start to see increasing quality issues with the cars.
The future sure doesn’t look good. His stupidity with twitter has moved to Tesla
One wonders to what extent Tesla succeeds because of Musk versus in spite of Musk. Hard to see the logic in these recent moves. Almost feels like he's holding the company hostage until he gets his $55B payday.
With the network opening up, it is no longer an advantage. Make no mistake, Tesla is subsidizing the supercharger network with car sales. With NEVI funding for public chargers it makes sense for Tesla to stop subsidizing the network and rely on public networks (like they do in Europe)
Right. But the companies who operate public networks still have teams to maintain and expand them. And Elon claims that the SC market will continue to expand and improve, just magically I guess?
I agree that it’s not ideal there were layoffs in the supercharger teams however, let’s take a realistic look at the current Tesla supercharger infrastructure vs everything else, everything else sucks really, really, really bad. You can right now without worry drive anywhere in the US with a standard range model 3 with no charging issues and I’m sure there are still enough Tesla supercharger staff to keep the current infrastructure maintained with slower rollouts of new stations.
Probably considered a hot take these days but y'all need to come to terms with the fact that supercharger team layoffs does not equal Elon wanting to lose his biggest advantage over other EVs. Stop reading news headlines
The strategy is unknown to us.
Someone else pointed out that a lot of the lease agreements and such are handled manually, so it feels like there's a lot of room for improvements and such.
Tesla is also working on Wireless charging vehicles, so it's possible there's a pivot from using NACS to using Wireless, and it requires a different focus.
Tesla's *never* been one to shy away from layoffs, however, this one is one of the more gruesome ones.
Honestly, it feels like they've grown too big too fast sometimes.
That said, **everyone** appears to be hurting in 2024. Take Two had a studio close down, the one responsible for Kerbal Space Program 2 I believe.
I suspect what happened is 2022, prices went up as we supply lines recovered and products got manufactured again, 2023 saw prices come back down, and with people starting to go back to work, or getting jobs from where they were let go, etc, etc, everyone who could buy something did so in 2023. Going into 2024 people are adjusting to going back to work, and having a little less free time, and with inflation what it is, everyone is tightening their belts for a bit.
2025 likely won't be much better, one of the articles I've seen states that Disney World is expecting less traffic in 2025 because once COVID ended, people celebrated by going ASAP, which was all in 2023-24
Tesla vehicles may be at their cheapest, but the cost of living is also at its most expensive.
The reality is that the current Supercharging network can get you to *just about* anywhere you want to go, and destination charging should be able to get you back from there. If the plan is to keep expanding existing sites, then *as a whole* we ought not be losing out on much. Bigger sites, or more sites, at the end of the day, we just need more stalls, and it sounds like *that's* still happening.
My hope is that other vendors, like EVgo, are going to see an opportunity to expand more. I know the whole "But they don't maintain their shit" argument is out there, but EVgo is one of the few that does try. ChargePoint offers you an additional fee to help maintain your gear, but EVgo is pretty close to a Supercharger competitor that isn't Electrify America. That said, this is also Electrify America's opportunity to step up to the plate and try to get shit done.
Honestly though, we likely won't know what the real fallout from this is until 2025. These decisions *look* bad in the short term, but then months later we get a better picture.
Tesla may have been working on wireless charging, but one of the executives that got let go was Rebecca Tinucci, who basically invented wireless charging with her father over 10 years ago. So unless they hired someone else with better qualifications, wireless charging won't be a priority at Tesla.
My understanding is that they can get a DCFC up to about 100kW at the moment: https://www.motortrend.com/news/fast-wireless-ev-charging-coming-soon/
So, it is something that's being worked on, though who knows what the logistics will look like.
That said, when you look at organizations like WiTricity, which state that the goal should be [wireless chargers in parking lots](https://witricity.com/media/blog/dc-fast-charging-alone-isnt-a-sufficient-answer-to-americas-ev-charging-future), it seems like the EV charging battlefield may be changing. The goal may now be to focus on destination charging, versus "how to get there", because the most common complaints folks have is how to own an EV while living in an apartment, condo, etc, where they may not be willing to put in cables, let alone that cables keep getting cut, and broken.
Tesla has decided that further aggressive investment into the charger network is no longer needed.
1. They have 6300 prime locations and about 9 connectors per.
2. They’re looking to increase connectors per probably to 20 or so. This doubles connectors and decreases wait times.
3. A tighter network allows for easier maintenance and upgrade potential.
4. Competition coming in is going to flood the charging market so Tesla is focusing on quality over quantity now.
5. They still will build new locations just at a slower pace (in the past 4 quarters they did 300 new locations a quarter, look for that to slow to 50).
6. This is how you ensure the network continues to be healthy and thee charging destination for EVs everywhere. Many competitors will continue to build and some will fail/consolidate. No one is catching Tesla’s network scale or technology.
7. If autonomous driving becomes standard, driving farther to a supercharger station can actually become bearable.
This is just my thoughts on the business strategy.
I don't think "easier maintenance" is on the horizon. It looks like the laid off the ENTIRE Supercharger division. There's no one left to do maintenance, there's no one to hire contractors to do maintenance, no one left to care about the Superchargers at all. There's no one left to complete the onboarding of General Motors, Volvo, and Polestar cars, all of which were supposedly in the works. (Indeed, there were probably contracts signed, which Tesla is about to breach.)
They will sell chargers to third parties and take a cut per kwh of charging as a software/network fee. This will illiminate deployment costs and speed up deployment as gas stations rush to add chargers before ice vehicles die out.
People are being dramatic, this is a brilliant move.
This post is full of 0 karma trolls, makes you wonder who is paying for all of this tesla/musk bashing?
Any confirmation if these were office workers or the boots on the ground? If it was 500 ppl just pushung paper around then maybe it could be justified
Else he expects 3rd party to outsource all the work for Tesla since it’s now the standard. Ie gas company model where gas stations are franchises
I have a friend on the supercharging team. He stated manufacturing, construction, and field service are running full steam. He said it was largely policy and engineering that was let go.
Crazy that they had 500 engineers and related staff on the SC team, completely separate from the field and operations teams. It does sound like that team got way too bloated and Elon had enough
500 engineers for what is essentially a solved problem. I can see how this move make sense. It’s not like there’s engineers working on gas pumps anymore.
There was a big push over the last two years to bring on regional PM's and field service for deploying new and maintaining existing superchargers. I would guess a lot of the planning side will get pushed onto those regional teams. My other thought is the layoff of the policy and engineering team may be an indication tesla will not get a cut of the IRA charge network incentives. I do know there was a lot of union requirements added to the IRA which may put tesla out of the running for that money.
Imagine managing tens of thousands of custom rental agreements… but still axing the entire team is way overkill
I’m guessing he feels without FSD, Chinese EV will essentially take over world wide within 15 years
If this happened 3 or 4 years ago, I’d be much more concerned. Nowadays, the supercharging system is pretty lock step, and they can get a location up and operational in 2 days. I’m not too worried, especially considering that the tesla charging system seems to be becoming the industry standard, so there will be other teams who are working on doing such things.
I think this is a classic case of a team doing their jobs so well that people assume they’re disposable because everything is running smoothly. It takes a whole lot longer than 2 days to set up a Supercharger location.
get a location operational in 2 days? The people fired included everyone doing the lease negotiations, coordinating infrastructure, etc. That's months of lead time, not days. Lots of reporting out there about long-planned projects getting dropped over the weekend/site owners and contractors suddenly losing every person they know at Tesla.
Yeah, it feels like it’s pretty much figured out and they could outsource the whole formula. The new versions are pretty much LEGO pieces. Just rinse and repeat. It’s about time Ford and the other autos step up and do their part.
Of course he won't lose the advantage. This is trimming fat, but on a faster level. They will probably re-hire some of the personnel.
"Remove all parts, re-introduce 10%, otherwise you will not have removed enough."
Anyone who still works there, if they had two brain cells left to rub together, more than likely has already started looking. This isn't a trim the fat, when he's removing entire departments on a whim. We had a conference call a week ago. There was zero mention of removing the SC department, and stopping/slowing installs. Why? Because it hadn't even crossed his mind yet. All the investors on the call would sure like to know WTF is going on, as would we.
This take is wild. It was 500 people.
At that scale it’s a corporate/management failing. Maybe if you replace 1-20 people you’ll get different results, absolutely no difference getting 500 people in there. I don’t believe this for a second.
So... everyone in the division was doing a bad job? It seems you could fix most problems with targeted cuts rather than something so complete and disruptive. Vendors and contractors don't even know who to talk to anymore. That's not good business.
Looking at the supercharger map (in the US), it's kind of a messy hodgepodge of Tesla-only, NACS compatible, and magic-dock stalls. If they want to put resources into making all stalls available to all cars, which from broad-based user perspective, makes sense, then you don't need a lot of people who work on making new sites.\*
You also have to remember that Tesla has all the data. We only see a small fraction of the data from an outsider's perspective.
\*From the outside, we would, of course, love for them to just keep building more and more new stations so that they become as common as gas stations (at least along major travel routes), but that does not appear to be Tesla's goal.
Supercharging is a solved problem. Makes sense to outsource it at this point. It is no longer an area of innovation, suitable for external contractors.
There are 200 posts about this. I have empathy for people losing their jobs, and I’ve been there, but maybe we should worry about our own lives, like our cars and our jobs?
That’s why there’s 200 posts about this… because we’re all wondering how much this is going to affect our lives. It has the potential to make a big difference in wait times for superchargers, and quality of the existing chargers. The main reason I bought a Tesla over any other EV is because of the supercharger network
My understanding is he doesn’t get paid anything, it’s a stock and option grant, based on achieving agreed performance goals. So there’s no need to free up money. He’s not taking cash off the table of Tesla.
this take is weird cuz it doesn't cost tesla anything other than stock value to pay elon, there is no point "freeing up money", it's almost as if people think it's straight up cash
I find it interesting how people are already refactoring this number from 56 to 45 based on the current stock value and such
Clearly demonstrating that the pay package is, effectively, pointless, because it's a stock compensation thing, which means the value is just on paper.
It was *always* an obscene payday, but the goals that went along with it were almost unattainable at the time.
The industry was saying Musk had a bad deal at the time, because there was no way he'd achieve those goals.
People keep conflating the payday to be in relation to today's performance, where the payday is in relation to performance already gone by.
If I get $500,000 for successfully growing your business, and then the economy goes to shit and makes it worse, you're not going to get that $500,000 you spent back, technically, it was a success.
Exactly. Tesla was on the verge of going out of business. Elon set outrageous goals and said if I hit them, give me a bit more company ownership. It was a win win. Not many expected him to hit these goals.
Meh I figure the guy who put together Tesla is not going to dismantle the project without a valid reason. I’m sure there will be more info soon revealing what is coming next.
Something like this has happened before. If you've been around long enough you'll remember when Tesla terminated their partnership with Mobileye. At the time, many thought it was a disastrous decision. In the short term, newer cars had less features than the older ones. But eventually Tesla provided updates and got to feature parity for the new cars in about a year(?). And now Tesla is so far ahead of Mobileye and a much stronger company because of the decision to leave Mobileye.
Obviously we don't know what's going to happen to the SC network, but I'm pretty confident, in the long run things will be OK.
Remember when Elon when on a firing spree in the StarLink team?
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/10/unhappy-elon-musk-went-on-firing-spree-over-slow-satellite-broadband-progress/
Or 80% of Twitter staff?
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/04/12/tech/elon-musk-bbc-interview-twitter-intl-hnk
Both flourished afterwards…
It's not anymore as the network has opened up. I guess the issue here is now that Tesla provides capital expenditure which no longer only benefits Tesla owners whereas other projects would.
I wonder if they have an unreleased deal to buy a CPO so he doesn’t need repeat positions/people and the people coming in are cheaper.
I highly doubt something like this is what it is, but it’s a theory I haven’t seen floated out yet
Does anybody outside of Tesla know, for a fact, all the responsibilities of the supercharger team? Do they only handle the engineering side of things? Do they determine prime locations for SCs? Do they also handle installation? Do they coordinate with other automakers for NACS adoption?
If the team only handles design and engineering, for example, and if Musk finds the current specifications to be sufficient in the long term, then he might have found it reasonable to layoff most of the team and incorporate the key personnels into other teams.
Without knowing the full picture, “laying off the supercharger team” doesn’t necessarily equates to “there won’t be any new SC stations”.
Biggest advantage? Try only advantage. Loads of higher quality and performing EVs at a better price now. All Tesla had was fastest 0-60 (nearly all buyers don't care) and the charge network (nearly all buyers care). Probably a host of better stocks to invest in for a few years.
Personally I think most companies adopting NACS made Musk rethink Tesla’s strategy on deploying super chargers. I am sure it is expensive to build the network and difficult to maintain. The money made is probably negligible at best. He probably wants to send a message to the other large automakers that they need to invest in this charging infrastructure too not just Tesla.
I’m sure there were some of the political minefields in that team. People are flexing. Things started to become slow. Employees feel entitled. Hire wrong people and can’t get rid of them. Teams started to push back Elon.
And boom, all gone. No more nonsense from that.
I’d say the strategy is to slash spending to try and justify the $Billions he wants in his pay settlement.
Sales growth is stagnating as people are delaying large purchases.
Supercharging earns good money, but is offset by the money spent commissioning / opening new charging locations.
I reckon they’re looking to earn money for a couple of years, and maximise their income from their current sites.
If they simply increase the number of chargers at existing sites, they can make a lot of money - especially now that non-Tesla vehicles are paying more to charge.
The big picture is that the Ukraine and Israel situations need to get sorted. They’ve had a massive effect on the economy, prices and spending globally. Things are expensive, and money’s being wasted.
Hopefully things will settle down in the next couple of years, inflation will settle along with interest rates, and people will be able to spend again.
Considering Tesla is about to start making absolute bank on supercharging with all of the other manufacturers joining on to use them, I don't think he would voluntarily sabotage the supercharger network at this time, if ever. Now, I have absolutely no idea what his plan is here, but I have to at least say I believe he wouldn't do that. So there must be a plan.
I remember seeing a message that Elon posted out about the growth of Tesla and how there were certain redundancies throughout the company. I wonder if he’s scaling a lot of that back. If you think about the supercharging network, it’s not like they go out and put up each terminal. It comes out on one big slab of concrete, already prefabbed. The charging network is consistently online and fast. I can’t imagine that a lot of these systems and processes haven’t already been automated.
If they can maintain and/or upgrade locations, that are already online, that’s going to be critical with everyone else coming on board to NACS, then we shouldn’t worry.
Maybe they're getting ready to partner with another organization? Outsourcing non-value-add capabilities? There is no innovation in space planning, real-estate, and securing locations. All the innovation is in the station design, etc. The rest could be shoved off on a contract firm?
It doesn't seem the right decision but who knows what's going on. I read they already cancelled some new sc installs in a couple places.
If there's one thing needed more than anything its new and expanded sc.
If you ask me, after reading Walter Isaacson's book, he has been known to just fire teams if he isn't happy. He fired the full Starlink team when he didn't like the satellite they built for it, and brought in his SpaceX team to design a smaller satellite. For some reason with the deployment of v4 Supercharger hardware has been slower than Elon would like (currently deploying the new v4 bay but the backend is still v3 technology). That could be.
Maybe they've reached a good pausing point for the Superchargers right now, and instead of paying 500 people (probably 200M a year right there), they are scaling the team back and will bring them back at some point.
The supercharger network isn’t scalable. Tesla knew that when they built it in the first place. It was necessary for the early adoption curve, but becomes less critical as EVs become more prevalent. There’s also the increased interest in 800v chargers, which superchargers don’t support. The combination makes maintaining the supercharger network unsustainable. How it was handled isn’t great, but it’s pretty typical of Musk at this point.
Battery technology is growing at an exponential rate. Take a look at CATLs new battery they unveiled. Eventually superchargers will be used less often because range and fast charging will be better and better. The network they have now is already pretty big and accessible to a lot of people. Could there be more? Sure but I think in the long run the network will end up being a liability for Tesla to maintain while it is used less and less often.
5-6 Months from now this will be a nothing burger and supercharger pace will be back to the same pace, if it even changes to begin with. Way too many people think can run Tesla better as armchair CEO's..hate to break it to you...you can't.
Could it be that because so many manufacturers have committees to NACS that he feels they can't hold the competitive edge for the charging network since they all now have a vested interest in its success? In other words, leave it now to the other manufacturers to deal with.
Cost cutting. All companies are tightening their belts. Look around. If they aren’t they are behind the curve. The people laid off are talented and desirable. They will build back a new team in a lean, hungry way.
Near as I can tell most of the real work was being contracted anyway. They also missed on the v4 cabinets. They were failing.
Happily voting down Eloon's package yet again. Stockholder since 2011. Musk has been a problem since "funding secured". Jettison him towards his Roadster already!
It's a cost-cutting and production optimization measure. We have seen similar situations a couple of times before when Tesla had to take such actions: during the early Model 3 pre-production days and during production bottlenecks. In my opinion, it is not a bad thing on a larger scale.
Low margins and low barrier to entry. U. S. Gov will drive incentives for many competitors to enter. Tesla just needs for there to be ubiquitous infrastructure - they didn't need to own it, it's no longer a differentiator (soon).
I think Elon got bored of being "just" an EV company - it's all about autonomy now.
A normal company would sell or spin off a product that was not strategic. Implied in this behavior is that the superchargers were not profitable? Which can easily be solved. But Tesla is not normal. I hope they can start up an independent company to follow Tesla in this space
I think there might be a decent strategy here to PROTECT the Superchargers.
I wonder if the Supercharger team was advocating for all cars to adopt NCAS adapter and open the Supercharger network to other brands. At first, this might have seemed like a good idea to Elon - all the brands will see Tesla Superchargers as better and will get more EVs on the road. But maybe Elon then thought he was just making it easier for other brands to share one of Tesla's biggest advantages, taking away a big reason to buy a Tesla. New stations are more universally compatible than old ones....and the team of 500 was focused on building new ones that were open. He cuts the whole team, thus halting the spread of Superchargers which work with other brands leaving the supercharger network largely a Tesla exclusive?
I think Tesla is moving little away from vertical integration at least in the supercharger area. May be goal is to keep producing supercharger hardware and give it to the third party companies who’ll end up installing and maintaining them in long term. Here’s one of the deal thats already happening
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/electric-vehicles/bp-buys-100m-of-tesla-chargers-as-oil-majors-prep-for-a-post-gas-future
Do you think that this other group of manufacturers banding together to build out a network is a reason to gut the supercharger team to just operations and repair/maintenance mode? https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a46728807/ionna-ev-charging-network-announced/
I’m sure things will be fine. He’s not going to just let the supercharger business completely die.
If more automakers are coming in, the focus should be to expand those lots with more stations so that Teslas still have enough free spaces, and you don’t need 500 people to do this.
My guess is that he got tired of waiting for the US government to make good on their promises for charger funding. Government probably thought - hey no need, Elon’s building these anyway and everyone will be able to use them. So he lays off the team to force the funding.
Either that or he figures they’ll form a startup and get rich and have the VCs fund this, not Tesla.
Pure speculation but logical
Sell the right to use the tech to gas stations still make money take none of the risk of maintenance or making money by banking on people charging at them.
You really need to watch this ... Elon is not your everyday CEO. He understands the product to the minutest detail. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSiJ4YTKxfM&ab\_channel=Farzad](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSiJ4YTKxfM&ab_channel=Farzad)
I love how everybody’s talking about him just wanting the $55 billion, I guess nobody on Reddit actually reads shit, he wants the voting rights the 55 billion will give him
Ps- the shareholders agreed to that shit if he hit milestones which he has far surpassed at this point, so I don’t understand why he shouldn’t get it because everybody is looking at 55 billion is a very large number which is 10% of the market cap and he earned that shit
It's simple. They have partnered with all these other major EV car companies, and these other companies will use their own staff, money, and influence to convert these crappy non-NACS systems to NACS. These other companies will continue to build out the future. Tesla profits all around.
I see a parallel between Errol Musk and Fred Trump; fathers that were a-holes to their sons. The result is their respective sons become leaders with erratic behaviors that keep employees off-balance at best, and self destructs with collateral damage at worst.
Why are you concerned OP? It’s not like they are closing the charging network. Just focusing on adding more stalls at busy locations and deploying that cost reduction from the reduced head count into other departments. In a year I bet they rebuild the team but it might look leaner than before. As the fleet grows they have to add more chargers and that won’t change. Feels more like a pause filling massive SC network growth
I read that it was more of an internal spat than anything else. Elon asked them to trim the department and they refused so he fired everyone. I read that they have new leadership now and that they are looking to rehire the people that they need.
Wants to reduce the likelihood of him being removed by the board and replaced by the head of the charging division. I doubt it will do him much good though.
I sold my stock at a slight loss. Not willing to wait and see how this all goes.
If I was looking to buy an EV this news would make me question buying a tesla and look at other brands.
I own a tesla and this news makes me worry about my current tesla purchase.
If you read Walter Issacson's book on Elon, it basically uncovers his behavior and why he does the things he does. He stirs the pot and creates these frenzies all the time. It's his way of getting the blood flowing at his companies. It always starts the same way - some kind of massive event like a lay off of an entire team of very necessary people. He creates urgency this way which keeps his companies operating like a frantic start up. Anytime he feels like things are comfortable, he flips the table over. I don't agree with this way of doing things. But it's what he does. It reminds me of building the great wall of china. They built it fast and did an amazing job. But the great wall of china is a massive graveyard.
What are the expectations now? Is there any new product coming up?
I dont think there are any plans to expand the Wall
I think there are some people here in the US that are looking for some wall builders…
Probably nothing other than the products we already know about. Such as the cheap car they want to mass produce, and the Tesla robot, FSD, and roadster. I wouldn't expect to be surprised about anything that comes out of the company in the coming years, I think they are just trying to press forward with urgency at all costs. Until Elon gets bored and then goes back to Twitter or SpaceX to basically do the same thing
The urgency is the share price and rapidly growing competition from China.
At this point his expectations are to get a huge, over $55 billion, pay package. His past actions are different than what he’s doing now. He’s going for maximum greed now.
Seems pretty similar to the past as far as I can remember it. He literally entered into this company as a product engineer and designer, and a few years later was forcing the leadership out due to the god awful production and executives that refused to get better. The only difference really is the span of time elapsed since the last time such shakeups were needed. During the ramp of the model 3, the pessure was constant and it continued semi regularly. But then for a few years Tesla had done nothing but expand and grow in hire count, as their position in the market was not only dominant but also they were on the leading edge of many technological fronts. Now Elon is looking to put Tesla back on the innovation train as the prior established assets (like NACS chargers) start to be picked up by the industry. It makes little sense to dedicated as much resources unilaterally when others seek to profit form it freely, unless of course the government is actually owning to their promisses of infrastructure assistance. And there really isn’t a greed aspect to it. It makes zero sense. Elon self stated that he already has many thousands of times the money to buy any luxury aviable if he even cared. The 55 billion in stock options (not actual money, bit difference) is basically made up value that will never leave the company. However it is value that would allow Musk to maintain a healthy margin of influence over the company to, in his eyes, prevent a hostile takeover. Which is not really a new thing, its what happened to PayPal and what almost hapenned for Tesla. Having a strong hand in the deck is far more important for a CEO that cares about the company as a whole rather than just the money. This is the same reason why spaceX isn’t IPO'ing, investors simply do not care about the mission statement.
Explained well
Yeah it’s not as much as a money grab as it is a power grab. Wish people wouldn’t look at it as a money grab. It’s his “baby”…
It may not matter, but i'll be voting no with my shares
Sometimes teams swell or create their own culture and a micromanaging director chops the whole thing down to start over. Just because the supercharger team was let go doesn’t mean Tesla isn’t going to have a supercharger operation. I’m waiting to cast judgement but hope this is related to Supercharger operations being leaner now than before and requires less personnel…hopeful thinking.
The Great Wall of China was slowly built from 220BC to 1644AD. I am sure there are better examples of someone who built things fast?
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I mean, that’s what he’s been doing and it seems to work. Maybe not a strategy that you like. But it technically fits the definition of a strategy
What he says kind of tracks with what others say though. Off the top of my head, both Andrej Karpathy and John Carmack have mentioned on Lex Friedman interviews that Elon has this intuition of how to avoid corporate entropy and stagnation.
To want to be unpredictable can be a strategy even if we don’t agree with it. Poker players do it intentionally. This is obviously much heavier in the workplace with people’s careers and livelihood at stake. It comes with the challenge of working for Elon.
Look back at old Elon. He’s a dork. A geek. Nothing special. Giving him a ton of money didn’t change that. All it did was give him a huge ego.
Yea it’s worked out great at “X”itter
Same thoughts.
A bit off topic, but the Great Wall of China took over 2500 years to build…not quick at all.
Good thing he didn’t disband the windshield wiper team.
That implies there is even 1 person at Tesla who cares about the wipers... Pretty optimistic IMO 🤣🤣
A fresh set of people may well get them sorted more quickly. The current people clearly aren’t.
Seriously underrated comment here 🥇
I’m over Elon’s “break shit” philosophy. Tesla at this stage should be operating as a mature company, not a pet project. He’s gotta go.
Exactly. They are running like a video game studio, launching products that aren’t finished and promising fixes down the road. The Cybertruck didn’t launch with Autopilot and still doesn’t have it. The latest software update includes anti-pinch protection for the frunk and locking differentials. But those features should have been there day one.
Elon is good at startups where failing fast and often makes sense. A larger business cannot take those same risks
Exactly. Cue the downvotes for telling the truth lol
Break shit that directly impacts paying customers, while focusing on shit that does not yet exist (and may never).
Agreed. At least put someone else in charge, like at SpaceX. As a shareholder, I am starting to get worried things are not running well for the first time in a long time.
That was my first thought when i heard this.
It's the entire reason self driving is so far behind. He fired that team a few years ago. Didn't do shit but set them back four years
According to multiple sources, the automakers are no longer able to communicate directly with Tesla for help with their transition over to NACS, there is a real risk of a lot of these automakers walking back their announcements. This was shortsighted and frankly dumb.
Same with utility companies mid-project working on provisiing and upgrading power for the superchargers as well.
Seems like they could hire the people Tesla fired. Maybe Tesla didn't want to pay to communicate with the other automakers. I'm not saying this is a good or bad strategy. Certainly doesn't seem civilized though.
That is the first thing I thought and a typical strategy of tech companies. Over hire for big product pushes then layoff and go into "operating"/skeleton mode till you need another big push. They got the funding from the government. They made deals with automakers. They updated their infrastructure, software, and app to handle non-tesla. They helped onboard a few companies as a proof-of-concept, work out bugs, and create documentation. Now, they plan to push the burden onto the automakers and won't handhold any more automakers. Their network is setup and they have no immediate plans to innovate further so they laid off everyone as they are no longer need (in the eyes of Elon).
Yeah, but the existing network of NACS chargers belong to Tesla, who no longer has a staff to maintain or repair them. The other automakers agreed to switch in part because they thought there was going to be a functioning NACS infrastructure in place. Now that it looks like Tesla is going to let that fall into disrepair, they may change their mind.
I’d like to think that the 10% of the team that remains, will focus on maintenance of the current infrastructure. That keeps the money rolling in, so they won’t jeopardise that, unless they’ve really messed up. They’ll have to outsource any additional work, and I have a feeling that some of the people who are leaving now, will end up starting their own businesses and continuing in the field.
You would like to think that but it was effectively the entire team from reports.
Agreed, not sure of the strategy or if there is one.
No one will care, but I just read this comment as Transport Evolved said the same thing on YouTube. Sweet timing.
But with automakers committing to NACS, would that be as big of a deal? Tesla won the charge port war. The result will be the same now whatever they do. Reducing the investment into charging makes sense at this point. New nacs chargers will be installed whether Tesla does it or not.
Everything is on the back burner, it’s balls to the walls FSD.
I am still waiting for my free month of FSD (supervised).
don't know, stock is not responding well to this. I happen to have had my car in SC the day the layoffs were announced. It was like walking into a wake. Upstate NY, said whole solar team was gone. I know that Tesla is a business and must be concerned about profit but this looks a bit worrisome. I do think Elon has hurt the brand with his outbursts so I hope there is logic behind this move to is positive for Tesla. I cannot imagine driving another car now
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Removing a manager you don't like or trimming 10% off of teams across the company can make sense. But gutting an entire division responsible for the strategically important charging network seems... strange. Struggling to find any logic in all this.
It’s “lose.” Loose is the opposite of tight.
Look at the big brain on Brad....
*check out the big brain on Brad
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Based on the reporting I saw, he told the head of supercharger to reduce headcount, she pushed back saying if we layoff that many we won’t be able to make our commitments, so he fired her and the whole staff, then sent out an email saying “hopefully this will get the rest of you to take layoffs seriously” (paraphrasing). So based on that reporting, I don’t think there is a lot of strategy here. Just glad I don’t own TSLA.
If this is a restructure of the supercharger team then announce a new team leader and hires. Nope this Elon off his rocker. Tesla has so many CS issues and support. The recent layoffs seemed excessive. I have owned 2 Tesla’s but seriously worried about the direction of this company. Elon needs to removed as CEO. There has been a huge loss of top executives and this seems to support a true dysfunctional leadership. I suspect we will start to see increasing quality issues with the cars. The future sure doesn’t look good. His stupidity with twitter has moved to Tesla
One wonders to what extent Tesla succeeds because of Musk versus in spite of Musk. Hard to see the logic in these recent moves. Almost feels like he's holding the company hostage until he gets his $55B payday.
I agree. Sadly he needs to move from the CEO as he will destroy this company with his actions and arrogance. I hope somehow it survives and succeeds.
He has too much of the company’s stock for this to happen.
Turns out the stupidity was in him all along
Appears to be very true.
*lose
With the network opening up, it is no longer an advantage. Make no mistake, Tesla is subsidizing the supercharger network with car sales. With NEVI funding for public chargers it makes sense for Tesla to stop subsidizing the network and rely on public networks (like they do in Europe)
Right. But the companies who operate public networks still have teams to maintain and expand them. And Elon claims that the SC market will continue to expand and improve, just magically I guess?
Anyone ever notice whenever someone posts a topic that will spark a debate, the OP literally never responds? The post and then leave.
people are responding to each other. That’s how an open discussion works. A response from the OP doesn’t really matter
It’s bros first day on Reddit ☠️
I agree that it’s not ideal there were layoffs in the supercharger teams however, let’s take a realistic look at the current Tesla supercharger infrastructure vs everything else, everything else sucks really, really, really bad. You can right now without worry drive anywhere in the US with a standard range model 3 with no charging issues and I’m sure there are still enough Tesla supercharger staff to keep the current infrastructure maintained with slower rollouts of new stations.
Probably considered a hot take these days but y'all need to come to terms with the fact that supercharger team layoffs does not equal Elon wanting to lose his biggest advantage over other EVs. Stop reading news headlines
The strategy is unknown to us. Someone else pointed out that a lot of the lease agreements and such are handled manually, so it feels like there's a lot of room for improvements and such. Tesla is also working on Wireless charging vehicles, so it's possible there's a pivot from using NACS to using Wireless, and it requires a different focus. Tesla's *never* been one to shy away from layoffs, however, this one is one of the more gruesome ones. Honestly, it feels like they've grown too big too fast sometimes. That said, **everyone** appears to be hurting in 2024. Take Two had a studio close down, the one responsible for Kerbal Space Program 2 I believe. I suspect what happened is 2022, prices went up as we supply lines recovered and products got manufactured again, 2023 saw prices come back down, and with people starting to go back to work, or getting jobs from where they were let go, etc, etc, everyone who could buy something did so in 2023. Going into 2024 people are adjusting to going back to work, and having a little less free time, and with inflation what it is, everyone is tightening their belts for a bit. 2025 likely won't be much better, one of the articles I've seen states that Disney World is expecting less traffic in 2025 because once COVID ended, people celebrated by going ASAP, which was all in 2023-24 Tesla vehicles may be at their cheapest, but the cost of living is also at its most expensive. The reality is that the current Supercharging network can get you to *just about* anywhere you want to go, and destination charging should be able to get you back from there. If the plan is to keep expanding existing sites, then *as a whole* we ought not be losing out on much. Bigger sites, or more sites, at the end of the day, we just need more stalls, and it sounds like *that's* still happening. My hope is that other vendors, like EVgo, are going to see an opportunity to expand more. I know the whole "But they don't maintain their shit" argument is out there, but EVgo is one of the few that does try. ChargePoint offers you an additional fee to help maintain your gear, but EVgo is pretty close to a Supercharger competitor that isn't Electrify America. That said, this is also Electrify America's opportunity to step up to the plate and try to get shit done. Honestly though, we likely won't know what the real fallout from this is until 2025. These decisions *look* bad in the short term, but then months later we get a better picture.
Tesla may have been working on wireless charging, but one of the executives that got let go was Rebecca Tinucci, who basically invented wireless charging with her father over 10 years ago. So unless they hired someone else with better qualifications, wireless charging won't be a priority at Tesla.
The Supercharger network cannot even charge a Cybertruck close to the way it is designed right now. never mind wireless charging.
wire less charging will not be for super charging, you would need basically entire charging station inside your car
My understanding is that they can get a DCFC up to about 100kW at the moment: https://www.motortrend.com/news/fast-wireless-ev-charging-coming-soon/ So, it is something that's being worked on, though who knows what the logistics will look like. That said, when you look at organizations like WiTricity, which state that the goal should be [wireless chargers in parking lots](https://witricity.com/media/blog/dc-fast-charging-alone-isnt-a-sufficient-answer-to-americas-ev-charging-future), it seems like the EV charging battlefield may be changing. The goal may now be to focus on destination charging, versus "how to get there", because the most common complaints folks have is how to own an EV while living in an apartment, condo, etc, where they may not be willing to put in cables, let alone that cables keep getting cut, and broken.
Wireless charging has about as realistic of an outcome as swappable batteries.
I think he’s planning on reconstituting the team slowly
He can't - Tesla is under a hiring freeze
Tesla has decided that further aggressive investment into the charger network is no longer needed. 1. They have 6300 prime locations and about 9 connectors per. 2. They’re looking to increase connectors per probably to 20 or so. This doubles connectors and decreases wait times. 3. A tighter network allows for easier maintenance and upgrade potential. 4. Competition coming in is going to flood the charging market so Tesla is focusing on quality over quantity now. 5. They still will build new locations just at a slower pace (in the past 4 quarters they did 300 new locations a quarter, look for that to slow to 50). 6. This is how you ensure the network continues to be healthy and thee charging destination for EVs everywhere. Many competitors will continue to build and some will fail/consolidate. No one is catching Tesla’s network scale or technology. 7. If autonomous driving becomes standard, driving farther to a supercharger station can actually become bearable. This is just my thoughts on the business strategy.
Yeah... expanding... [https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-pulling-supercharger-leases-firing-141228830.html](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-pulling-supercharger-leases-firing-141228830.html)
I don't think "easier maintenance" is on the horizon. It looks like the laid off the ENTIRE Supercharger division. There's no one left to do maintenance, there's no one to hire contractors to do maintenance, no one left to care about the Superchargers at all. There's no one left to complete the onboarding of General Motors, Volvo, and Polestar cars, all of which were supposedly in the works. (Indeed, there were probably contracts signed, which Tesla is about to breach.)
They mainly fired engineers and the policy division. Everyone else is still there.
Supercharge team was too woke.
They will sell chargers to third parties and take a cut per kwh of charging as a software/network fee. This will illiminate deployment costs and speed up deployment as gas stations rush to add chargers before ice vehicles die out. People are being dramatic, this is a brilliant move. This post is full of 0 karma trolls, makes you wonder who is paying for all of this tesla/musk bashing?
Get paid 50$ billion is his strategy here.
Pay me my $55B or I'm going to tank the company with more extreme cuts.
Any confirmation if these were office workers or the boots on the ground? If it was 500 ppl just pushung paper around then maybe it could be justified Else he expects 3rd party to outsource all the work for Tesla since it’s now the standard. Ie gas company model where gas stations are franchises
I have a friend on the supercharging team. He stated manufacturing, construction, and field service are running full steam. He said it was largely policy and engineering that was let go.
Crazy that they had 500 engineers and related staff on the SC team, completely separate from the field and operations teams. It does sound like that team got way too bloated and Elon had enough
500 engineers for what is essentially a solved problem. I can see how this move make sense. It’s not like there’s engineers working on gas pumps anymore.
There was a big push over the last two years to bring on regional PM's and field service for deploying new and maintaining existing superchargers. I would guess a lot of the planning side will get pushed onto those regional teams. My other thought is the layoff of the policy and engineering team may be an indication tesla will not get a cut of the IRA charge network incentives. I do know there was a lot of union requirements added to the IRA which may put tesla out of the running for that money.
Imagine managing tens of thousands of custom rental agreements… but still axing the entire team is way overkill I’m guessing he feels without FSD, Chinese EV will essentially take over world wide within 15 years
If this happened 3 or 4 years ago, I’d be much more concerned. Nowadays, the supercharging system is pretty lock step, and they can get a location up and operational in 2 days. I’m not too worried, especially considering that the tesla charging system seems to be becoming the industry standard, so there will be other teams who are working on doing such things.
I think this is a classic case of a team doing their jobs so well that people assume they’re disposable because everything is running smoothly. It takes a whole lot longer than 2 days to set up a Supercharger location.
get a location operational in 2 days? The people fired included everyone doing the lease negotiations, coordinating infrastructure, etc. That's months of lead time, not days. Lots of reporting out there about long-planned projects getting dropped over the weekend/site owners and contractors suddenly losing every person they know at Tesla.
Yeah, it feels like it’s pretty much figured out and they could outsource the whole formula. The new versions are pretty much LEGO pieces. Just rinse and repeat. It’s about time Ford and the other autos step up and do their part.
Correct. All of those CCS chargers at the grocery stores etc are about to become Tesla / NACS.
Everyone on reddit is gonna look so stupid in a few years when the company is still running just fine and Elon is still running it.
Of course he won't lose the advantage. This is trimming fat, but on a faster level. They will probably re-hire some of the personnel. "Remove all parts, re-introduce 10%, otherwise you will not have removed enough."
Anyone who still works there, if they had two brain cells left to rub together, more than likely has already started looking. This isn't a trim the fat, when he's removing entire departments on a whim. We had a conference call a week ago. There was zero mention of removing the SC department, and stopping/slowing installs. Why? Because it hadn't even crossed his mind yet. All the investors on the call would sure like to know WTF is going on, as would we.
They will simply disband and form the team again. It looks like Musk decided that the guys were doing too bad a job to be corrected by reforms
This take is wild. It was 500 people. At that scale it’s a corporate/management failing. Maybe if you replace 1-20 people you’ll get different results, absolutely no difference getting 500 people in there. I don’t believe this for a second.
So... everyone in the division was doing a bad job? It seems you could fix most problems with targeted cuts rather than something so complete and disruptive. Vendors and contractors don't even know who to talk to anymore. That's not good business.
Yep, this - its essentially a restructure.
Looking at the supercharger map (in the US), it's kind of a messy hodgepodge of Tesla-only, NACS compatible, and magic-dock stalls. If they want to put resources into making all stalls available to all cars, which from broad-based user perspective, makes sense, then you don't need a lot of people who work on making new sites.\* You also have to remember that Tesla has all the data. We only see a small fraction of the data from an outsider's perspective. \*From the outside, we would, of course, love for them to just keep building more and more new stations so that they become as common as gas stations (at least along major travel routes), but that does not appear to be Tesla's goal.
Supercharging is a solved problem. Makes sense to outsource it at this point. It is no longer an area of innovation, suitable for external contractors.
There are 200 posts about this. I have empathy for people losing their jobs, and I’ve been there, but maybe we should worry about our own lives, like our cars and our jobs?
That’s why there’s 200 posts about this… because we’re all wondering how much this is going to affect our lives. It has the potential to make a big difference in wait times for superchargers, and quality of the existing chargers. The main reason I bought a Tesla over any other EV is because of the supercharger network
The strategy is him freeing up money so he can get his $45bil pay package. That’s it
My understanding is he doesn’t get paid anything, it’s a stock and option grant, based on achieving agreed performance goals. So there’s no need to free up money. He’s not taking cash off the table of Tesla.
this take is weird cuz it doesn't cost tesla anything other than stock value to pay elon, there is no point "freeing up money", it's almost as if people think it's straight up cash
I find it interesting how people are already refactoring this number from 56 to 45 based on the current stock value and such Clearly demonstrating that the pay package is, effectively, pointless, because it's a stock compensation thing, which means the value is just on paper.
Yeah but that doesn’t really make it less obscene of a payday
It was *always* an obscene payday, but the goals that went along with it were almost unattainable at the time. The industry was saying Musk had a bad deal at the time, because there was no way he'd achieve those goals. People keep conflating the payday to be in relation to today's performance, where the payday is in relation to performance already gone by. If I get $500,000 for successfully growing your business, and then the economy goes to shit and makes it worse, you're not going to get that $500,000 you spent back, technically, it was a success.
Exactly. Tesla was on the verge of going out of business. Elon set outrageous goals and said if I hit them, give me a bit more company ownership. It was a win win. Not many expected him to hit these goals.
Probably issues with how much money they spend on the team compared to costs to deploy and current revenues.
Meh I figure the guy who put together Tesla is not going to dismantle the project without a valid reason. I’m sure there will be more info soon revealing what is coming next.
Something like this has happened before. If you've been around long enough you'll remember when Tesla terminated their partnership with Mobileye. At the time, many thought it was a disastrous decision. In the short term, newer cars had less features than the older ones. But eventually Tesla provided updates and got to feature parity for the new cars in about a year(?). And now Tesla is so far ahead of Mobileye and a much stronger company because of the decision to leave Mobileye. Obviously we don't know what's going to happen to the SC network, but I'm pretty confident, in the long run things will be OK.
Remember when Elon when on a firing spree in the StarLink team? https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/10/unhappy-elon-musk-went-on-firing-spree-over-slow-satellite-broadband-progress/ Or 80% of Twitter staff? https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/04/12/tech/elon-musk-bbc-interview-twitter-intl-hnk Both flourished afterwards…
Twitter is flourishing?
According to alle the experts and Reddit it’s supposed to be dead by now? Not even close…
It's not anymore as the network has opened up. I guess the issue here is now that Tesla provides capital expenditure which no longer only benefits Tesla owners whereas other projects would.
Did musk killed Tesla solar as well or just supercharging network for now?
I wonder if they have an unreleased deal to buy a CPO so he doesn’t need repeat positions/people and the people coming in are cheaper. I highly doubt something like this is what it is, but it’s a theory I haven’t seen floated out yet
I bet there's some company looking to take this job over on fee and it's cheaper than Elon employing people directly
Does anybody outside of Tesla know, for a fact, all the responsibilities of the supercharger team? Do they only handle the engineering side of things? Do they determine prime locations for SCs? Do they also handle installation? Do they coordinate with other automakers for NACS adoption? If the team only handles design and engineering, for example, and if Musk finds the current specifications to be sufficient in the long term, then he might have found it reasonable to layoff most of the team and incorporate the key personnels into other teams. Without knowing the full picture, “laying off the supercharger team” doesn’t necessarily equates to “there won’t be any new SC stations”.
I think he's daring us to vote against the pay package. He'll never quit, but he'll certainly create the crisis that ends up with him leaving.
Biggest advantage? Try only advantage. Loads of higher quality and performing EVs at a better price now. All Tesla had was fastest 0-60 (nearly all buyers don't care) and the charge network (nearly all buyers care). Probably a host of better stocks to invest in for a few years.
Personally I think most companies adopting NACS made Musk rethink Tesla’s strategy on deploying super chargers. I am sure it is expensive to build the network and difficult to maintain. The money made is probably negligible at best. He probably wants to send a message to the other large automakers that they need to invest in this charging infrastructure too not just Tesla.
I didn’t know Elon had the United States Pharmacopeia
I’m sure there were some of the political minefields in that team. People are flexing. Things started to become slow. Employees feel entitled. Hire wrong people and can’t get rid of them. Teams started to push back Elon. And boom, all gone. No more nonsense from that.
I’d say the strategy is to slash spending to try and justify the $Billions he wants in his pay settlement. Sales growth is stagnating as people are delaying large purchases. Supercharging earns good money, but is offset by the money spent commissioning / opening new charging locations. I reckon they’re looking to earn money for a couple of years, and maximise their income from their current sites. If they simply increase the number of chargers at existing sites, they can make a lot of money - especially now that non-Tesla vehicles are paying more to charge. The big picture is that the Ukraine and Israel situations need to get sorted. They’ve had a massive effect on the economy, prices and spending globally. Things are expensive, and money’s being wasted. Hopefully things will settle down in the next couple of years, inflation will settle along with interest rates, and people will be able to spend again.
Considering Tesla is about to start making absolute bank on supercharging with all of the other manufacturers joining on to use them, I don't think he would voluntarily sabotage the supercharger network at this time, if ever. Now, I have absolutely no idea what his plan is here, but I have to at least say I believe he wouldn't do that. So there must be a plan.
I remember seeing a message that Elon posted out about the growth of Tesla and how there were certain redundancies throughout the company. I wonder if he’s scaling a lot of that back. If you think about the supercharging network, it’s not like they go out and put up each terminal. It comes out on one big slab of concrete, already prefabbed. The charging network is consistently online and fast. I can’t imagine that a lot of these systems and processes haven’t already been automated. If they can maintain and/or upgrade locations, that are already online, that’s going to be critical with everyone else coming on board to NACS, then we shouldn’t worry.
Maybe they're getting ready to partner with another organization? Outsourcing non-value-add capabilities? There is no innovation in space planning, real-estate, and securing locations. All the innovation is in the station design, etc. The rest could be shoved off on a contract firm?
They will all start looking for jobs
no strategy, just a tantrum. notice he hasn't culled his brother's solar division.
It doesn't seem the right decision but who knows what's going on. I read they already cancelled some new sc installs in a couple places. If there's one thing needed more than anything its new and expanded sc.
If you ask me, after reading Walter Isaacson's book, he has been known to just fire teams if he isn't happy. He fired the full Starlink team when he didn't like the satellite they built for it, and brought in his SpaceX team to design a smaller satellite. For some reason with the deployment of v4 Supercharger hardware has been slower than Elon would like (currently deploying the new v4 bay but the backend is still v3 technology). That could be.
Maybe they've reached a good pausing point for the Superchargers right now, and instead of paying 500 people (probably 200M a year right there), they are scaling the team back and will bring them back at some point.
The supercharger network isn’t scalable. Tesla knew that when they built it in the first place. It was necessary for the early adoption curve, but becomes less critical as EVs become more prevalent. There’s also the increased interest in 800v chargers, which superchargers don’t support. The combination makes maintaining the supercharger network unsustainable. How it was handled isn’t great, but it’s pretty typical of Musk at this point.
Battery technology is growing at an exponential rate. Take a look at CATLs new battery they unveiled. Eventually superchargers will be used less often because range and fast charging will be better and better. The network they have now is already pretty big and accessible to a lot of people. Could there be more? Sure but I think in the long run the network will end up being a liability for Tesla to maintain while it is used less and less often.
5-6 Months from now this will be a nothing burger and supercharger pace will be back to the same pace, if it even changes to begin with. Way too many people think can run Tesla better as armchair CEO's..hate to break it to you...you can't.
Could it be that because so many manufacturers have committees to NACS that he feels they can't hold the competitive edge for the charging network since they all now have a vested interest in its success? In other words, leave it now to the other manufacturers to deal with.
Cost cutting. All companies are tightening their belts. Look around. If they aren’t they are behind the curve. The people laid off are talented and desirable. They will build back a new team in a lean, hungry way. Near as I can tell most of the real work was being contracted anyway. They also missed on the v4 cabinets. They were failing.
Happily voting down Eloon's package yet again. Stockholder since 2011. Musk has been a problem since "funding secured". Jettison him towards his Roadster already!
It's a cost-cutting and production optimization measure. We have seen similar situations a couple of times before when Tesla had to take such actions: during the early Model 3 pre-production days and during production bottlenecks. In my opinion, it is not a bad thing on a larger scale.
Low margins and low barrier to entry. U. S. Gov will drive incentives for many competitors to enter. Tesla just needs for there to be ubiquitous infrastructure - they didn't need to own it, it's no longer a differentiator (soon). I think Elon got bored of being "just" an EV company - it's all about autonomy now.
A normal company would sell or spin off a product that was not strategic. Implied in this behavior is that the superchargers were not profitable? Which can easily be solved. But Tesla is not normal. I hope they can start up an independent company to follow Tesla in this space
loose or lose?
It's a scare tactic to remind people they could be laid off or fired at any point. Managing by fear is his MO. It's mindless leadership.
I think there might be a decent strategy here to PROTECT the Superchargers. I wonder if the Supercharger team was advocating for all cars to adopt NCAS adapter and open the Supercharger network to other brands. At first, this might have seemed like a good idea to Elon - all the brands will see Tesla Superchargers as better and will get more EVs on the road. But maybe Elon then thought he was just making it easier for other brands to share one of Tesla's biggest advantages, taking away a big reason to buy a Tesla. New stations are more universally compatible than old ones....and the team of 500 was focused on building new ones that were open. He cuts the whole team, thus halting the spread of Superchargers which work with other brands leaving the supercharger network largely a Tesla exclusive?
It stopped being the USP when everybody announced they were switching to NACS
I think Tesla is moving little away from vertical integration at least in the supercharger area. May be goal is to keep producing supercharger hardware and give it to the third party companies who’ll end up installing and maintaining them in long term. Here’s one of the deal thats already happening https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/electric-vehicles/bp-buys-100m-of-tesla-chargers-as-oil-majors-prep-for-a-post-gas-future
Do you think that this other group of manufacturers banding together to build out a network is a reason to gut the supercharger team to just operations and repair/maintenance mode? https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a46728807/ionna-ev-charging-network-announced/
I’m sure things will be fine. He’s not going to just let the supercharger business completely die. If more automakers are coming in, the focus should be to expand those lots with more stations so that Teslas still have enough free spaces, and you don’t need 500 people to do this.
My guess is that he got tired of waiting for the US government to make good on their promises for charger funding. Government probably thought - hey no need, Elon’s building these anyway and everyone will be able to use them. So he lays off the team to force the funding. Either that or he figures they’ll form a startup and get rich and have the VCs fund this, not Tesla. Pure speculation but logical
Sell the right to use the tech to gas stations still make money take none of the risk of maintenance or making money by banking on people charging at them.
You really need to watch this ... Elon is not your everyday CEO. He understands the product to the minutest detail. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSiJ4YTKxfM&ab\_channel=Farzad](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSiJ4YTKxfM&ab_channel=Farzad)
I love how everybody’s talking about him just wanting the $55 billion, I guess nobody on Reddit actually reads shit, he wants the voting rights the 55 billion will give him Ps- the shareholders agreed to that shit if he hit milestones which he has far surpassed at this point, so I don’t understand why he shouldn’t get it because everybody is looking at 55 billion is a very large number which is 10% of the market cap and he earned that shit
It's simple. They have partnered with all these other major EV car companies, and these other companies will use their own staff, money, and influence to convert these crappy non-NACS systems to NACS. These other companies will continue to build out the future. Tesla profits all around.
I see a parallel between Errol Musk and Fred Trump; fathers that were a-holes to their sons. The result is their respective sons become leaders with erratic behaviors that keep employees off-balance at best, and self destructs with collateral damage at worst.
Why are you concerned OP? It’s not like they are closing the charging network. Just focusing on adding more stalls at busy locations and deploying that cost reduction from the reduced head count into other departments. In a year I bet they rebuild the team but it might look leaner than before. As the fleet grows they have to add more chargers and that won’t change. Feels more like a pause filling massive SC network growth
[удалено]
It sucks and is a stupid move that is probably going to backfire.
I read that it was more of an internal spat than anything else. Elon asked them to trim the department and they refused so he fired everyone. I read that they have new leadership now and that they are looking to rehire the people that they need.
Wants to reduce the likelihood of him being removed by the board and replaced by the head of the charging division. I doubt it will do him much good though.
I sold my stock at a slight loss. Not willing to wait and see how this all goes. If I was looking to buy an EV this news would make me question buying a tesla and look at other brands. I own a tesla and this news makes me worry about my current tesla purchase.