In 2021, Tesla became the sixth company in the U.S. to reach $1 trillion in market value.
Over the past few months, however, global sales have plummeted, causing the company’s profits to drop more than 50 percent. The electric car maker has also laid off nearly 16,000 employees, including those in the engineering, services, and software teams.
Since then, Tesla has removed all job postings in the U.S., in what appears to be a hiring freeze across North America.
As of this week, there are only three positions listed on the company’s career page, all of which are for their manufacturing development program in California, Texas, or Nevada.
Those who have looked at the job board earlier this month will know that it’s a huge drop from the nearly 3,500 positions that were offered in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and Puerto Rico, though the majority were in Nevada, California, and Texas, as that’s where most of Tesla’s factories are.
On LinkedIn, the company is advertising more than 320 jobs, the majority of which are located in China, with a few in the Dominican Republic and Europe. Only one, however, is based in the United States.
This is the second time that the electric carmaker has cleared all of its job listings since April 16, when the first round of massive layoffs were announced.
In an email to employees, CEO Elon Musk wrote that the company’s rapid growth has led to ‘a duplication of job functions and roles in some areas’, which led to job cuts. He also said the company is looking at ‘every aspect for increasing productivity and cost reductions’ while moving onto their next stage of growth.
Despite having sent his former employees well wishes in the email, he was less than apologetic about the layoffs when talking to senior executives at the company over e-mail, where he claimed he wanted to be ‘absolutely hardcore’ with the layoffs.
In the same email, he asked executives with more than three employees who failed ‘the excellent, trustworthy, and necessary test’ to resign. At least three have since left the company.
According to Bloomberg, over 20,000 employees have been laid off by the company during the initial round of layoffs. Those who were offered summer internships also had their offers revoked just weeks before they were scheduled to start.
As of Monday, the electric carmaker entered its fourth consecutive week of headcount reductions, with the latest round affecting product engineers, human resource workers, industrializing engineers, service advisers, and more.
At least six high-profile and senior executives have also left the company or plan to do so within the upcoming months, including Drew Baglino, the former senior VP of Powertrain & Energy Engineering at Tesla.
