Elon Musk Laid Off Supercharger Team After Taking $17 Million in Federal Charging Grants

lautan@lemmy.ca to Technology@lemmy.world – 864 points – Elon Musk Laid Off Supercharger Team After Taking $17 Million in Federal Charging Grants
gizmodo.com

Despite its CEO railing against Biden, Tesla was more than happy to take the administration's money.

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Stealing this from a comment on the restera threaad

Internally employees left at Tesla are calling this the "Snap". My friend was building over 10 new sites and breaking ground on 3 others. Contractors are getting fucked and have no one to contact. Overnight 100's of sites with 100's of contractors, design companies and suppliers working on them are just in limbo with not a single person from Tesla reaching out to them and their contact laid off. Lots of layoffs are going to be tied to this.

Not only does this affect the building of new sites there's now not a single employee that can perform maintenance at any of these locations.

This is going to cascade across many companies and industries. Because this is basically taking a massive infrastructure effort and suddenly cutting off the management and production of specialized hardware.

And, tinfoil, but this very much feels like an attempt to steal the election for republicans. Because this is going to impact the infrastructure efforts of the Biden administration AND cause a lot of layoffs among blue collar workers when they can't send invoices or get paid because everyone they knew got fired. And you can bet there will be a social media shitstorm over "Biden is trying to steal money from my company" if there is any attempt to recoup the money that is being put into a giant reward package for musk.

Maybe it’s time we nationalize our infrastructure. Railroads, telecom, electric grid. The capitalists have jerked us around nonstop

Agree. Let's start with Tesla!

At least the charging network. We can buy it off Tesla no problem (we already have them a $17 million down payment).

Then start printing up new stickers to cover the Tesla logos.

I don’t even own an EV and I support funding this. It’s probably cheaper than the existing charger network plan anyway and would allow actually standardizing around the smaller smarter Tesla plugs too.

And, tinfoil, but this very much feels like an attempt to steal the election for republicans. Because this is going to impact the infrastructure efforts of the Biden administration AND cause a lot of layoffs among blue collar workers when they can’t send invoices or get paid because everyone they knew got fired.

There was a time when I could have thought that level of calculation of Musk. That time is long since gone. His mouth cost him $44 billion when he was forced to buy twitter because of his edgy comments online. Musk's recent comments about the firings were his version of the criteria of "excellent, necessary, and trustworthy" and did not, apparently include the entire Supercharger team. Any outside observer would say the Supercharger team is absolutely "excellent, necessary, and trustworthy".

This latest action by Musk just reeks like a mania episode with a good dose of paranoia mixed it. I don't think it has anything to do with the election.

I was holding stock specifically to be able to vote Musk out, but this latest move was the last straw. I sold what I had after the announcement yesterday. Its already down $5/share lower than when I sold mine yesterday.

He's smart enough to listen if someone like Banon or Putin contacted him though. He could be dumb and doing what someone else tells him to do.

Yup. Even the twitter stupidity makes a lot more sense if his "friends" were egging him on to destroy one of the most useful tools out there for activists to coordinate and information to spread outside of state outlets.

Same way Candace Owen used to hang around with Kanye and all of a sudden he started saying all his racist shit out loud. It was always there based on some inside stories, but theres a corealtion with his worse public decisions and her influence.

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17 million seems like a lot, doesn't it.

Elon wants a 56,000 million pay package.

It's $56,000,000,000.00.

Fifty six BILLION dollars.

Or, if you're trying to make it more directly comparable to 17 million (because humans aren't great at implicitly comparing that many zeros), that would be 56,000 millions. It's not how we normally say it, but 17 vs 56,000 feels different than 17 million vs 56 billion.

While odd looking to some of us, they were actually right. That's 56,000 "millions" or 56,000 x 1,000,000 = 56 billion. A mind blowing amount of cash.

Most of us have no intuition about millions of anything let alone billions, same as we have a good handle on seconds and days and years but start talking about nanoseconds or centuries and most of us have completely lost any meaningful frame of reference.

The difference between a million and a billion dollars is approximately 1 billion dollars.

He quite literally does not add this amount of value in any way. No single human possibly could. What a joke.

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