The decision behind Tesla (TSLA) cutting its Supercharger team was allegedly not as planned out as the other layoffs the company conducted a few weeks prior.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk reportedly decided to lay off the company’s 500-member Supercharger group a day after a meeting with the team’s leader went south, according to a Reuters, which spoke to former staffers who were on the team.
Musk met with Rebecca Tinucci, who was the senior director of electric vehicle charging and head of the Supercharger initiative, to talk about her division’s future. She expected Musk to confirm plans to massively expand the charging network after she cut 15% to 20% of her staff a few weeks earlier.
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Musk was reportedly “not pleased” with Tinucci’s expectations and expressed that he wanted to lay off more staff members. Tinnucci disagreed with his decision and told him that more layoffs would “undermine charging-business fundamentals.” His response to her concern was firing her and her team on April 29, the day after the meeting, according to former staff members.
In an internal email announcing the cuts, Musk said that he wanted staff to be “absolutely hard core about headcount and cost reduction” going forward, according to a report from The Information. He also said in the memo that staff members of executives who “don’t obviously pass the excellent, necessary and trustworthy test” will also be laid off.
The decision to cut the Supercharger team led to confusion and a bit of backlash as the business world assumed that the cuts meant that Tesla was halting its investment in superchargers, which quickly charge Tesla vehicles. This appeared to have led Musk to state on social media platform X that he will spend over $500 million to expand the company’s Supercharger network in the future.
Just to reiterate: Tesla will spend well over $500M expanding our Supercharger network to create thousands of NEW chargers this year.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 10, 2024
That’s just on new sites and expansions, not counting operations costs, which are much higher.
Shortly after he made the post on X, Musk reportedly began hiring back an unknown number of employees to the Supercharger team. One of the rehires is allegedly Max de Zegher, the director of charging for North America, according to a recent report from Bloomberg. Zegher was one of the “top managers” who was a part of the Supercharger initiative.
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The Supercharger network, which was first introduced in 2012, is big business for Tesla. Superchargers can charge Tesla vehicles in as little as 15 minutes and can add 200 miles of range. Tesla called the technology a “game changer” for electric vehicles when the network was first announced.
In February, Tesla began ramping up its expansion of its Supercharger network to more non-Tesla EV owners across the country. In the company’s first-quarter earnings report for 2024, it revealed that its fleet of Supercharger stations increased by 26% year-over-year, and its Supercharger connectors rose by 27%.
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