Elon Musk laid off the Tesla Supercharger team; now he’s rehiring them

flop_leash_973@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 588 points – Elon Musk laid off the Tesla Supercharger team; now he’s rehiring them
arstechnica.com

I can't imagine anyone that has decent prospects would agree to go back to Tesla after getting canned with those kinds of wild swings in decision making.

96

Since it’s only been a week, a lot of those people are going to come back. But now they’re coming back with updated resumes and a linked in pro subscription. The good folks will be bailing in the coming months, but they’ll stay and work in a half ass way since it’s better than unemployment and cobra. Musk basically ensured uncontrolled attrition.

How did this idiot actually manage to ship cars to begin with?

He had better handlers and PR team back then so more people thought he was just an eccentric billionaire Playboy inventor and were willing to do the dirty work needed to make it happen.

All his pedo calling and right wing crazy got online when he fired them.

I think he was genuinely better back then too.

Not great - in a ton of ways - but way better.

Something snapped 4 or so years ago and all his worst parts have been getting progressively worse.

I think part of it was he had a really tough time dealing with California covid regulations for his business. It wasn’t something he could buy his way out of or pad someone’s pocket to make go away and they were very serious about it. In the same vein, that’s around the time his daughter came out as trans and you can see how that ended with her changing her name and completely disassociating herself from him. Combine that all with a slow (arguable) but consistent decline in the public’s admiration and opinion of him (which he craves desperately) and he began to crack.

Started running into things he couldn’t control or pay to go away and couldn’t cope I guess… I dunno

I can tell you, knowing people who worked with the guy since the original launch of the Model S, he's always been like this. He's always been a loud mouthed idiot, and he's always been insanely unpredictable. The only thing that changed has been his PR team and personal handlers, and how much the news media is willing to focus on how much of a POS the dude is.

It's why you see hyper-wealthy dissolve everh so often. When you're used to total control and suddenly things that you cannot change no matter how much money you throw at it, you start to lose it.

I mean if you read some of what his first wife wrote, he was pretty much this bad. Though at the time she was saying it the world didn't want to hear it. He also did the whole retcon Tesla to be founded by him over 15 years ago, in some pretty petty behavior. When x.com failed relative to PayPal, he somehow managed to get them to merge and make him the head of PayPal, and then they kicked him down when we almost tanked PayPal.

It basically seems that a critical mass of people were covering for him and propping up the brand of his name and image, likely for the sake of their investments. Which should be a fairly familiar story, because 80s Trump had the same things going on, very bad business results glossed over by investors needing to keep the Trump brand strong for the sake of their own money. Both trump and musk successfully tied up some big business fate with their names specifically, forcing investors to play into the conceit.

He let the crazy veil slip a bit during the Thai cave rescue drama, but Covid seems to have really pushed him over the edge.

Yeah I’d say it started more like 8 years ago. When he started going crazy on Twitter.

He didn't, he bought in to a company that was already set on doing it.

My point being, development of the consumer cars didn’t really kick off instill after Tarpenning and Eberhard left, and I don’t see how this current iteration of Musk would’ve pulled that off. I feel like this iteration of Musk would’ve fucked up Telsa spectacularly.

When the roadster shipped in 2008, that company could only hand make a few hundred cars a year and they didn’t even know how to make their own chassis, seats, infotainment software, etc. They had powertrain tech, and that’s about it.

The vast majority of the consumer product development and manufacturing tech was built after the OG founders left.

A company is more than its most visible members. There were likely plenty of competent people in the hierarchy that were there before Musk and were able to continue that trend of competency until Musk decided he needed to control more and more of the intricacies of the company.

The difference isnt what he was doing before to make things run smoothly so much as what he wasn't... that being getting in the way. He was a glorified PR guy. Which he was great at. Running a tech and manufacturing company? Not so much.

but they’ll stay and work in a half ass way since it’s better than unemployment and cobra.

Yep. Or they'll stay and do no work at all and count on it taking a long while for anyone to even notice.

it certainly isn't competent management they're working for.

I mean he was not so incompetent at one point. not sure what year exactly it was but he lost it at some point.

I read in another thread that a lot of people agreed Elon lost it when he called that diver of the rescue team for kids trapped in a cave in Thailand a pedo. I mean wtf. If I remember correctly he never apologized and defended his insult. That’s completely unacceptable.

Yeah. That’s when we noticed it publicly. I was pretty online at that time period and Elon was well regarded before that. There were the his family wealth issues and the whole ousting Tesla founders and calling himself one or whatever that whole thing was.but they seemed like an alright side effect of genuis at the time…

Certainly sometime before that and the purchase of X but at one point with tesla, spaceX, and solar/battery stuff he seemed to be going somewhere. even the boring company. It was around or post hyperloop. I think he needed an excuse for the boring company and then I dunno somehow lost it with it being impractical.

The solar/battery stuff was just him saving an almost bankrupt company his cousins had. SpaceX and Tesla had both invested in the company, and he would have lost the money and like faced regulatory scrutiny had it went under.

Hyperloop was his effort to disrupt California's high-speed rail plans.

Hyperloop? The failed project he pushed just to make sure other possible projects that would just work would not be done? Yeah, he was better back then… not.

Pedo Guy Musk let us know it's just a South African phrase that's common.

Not only did he never apologize, he paid for investigation in the hopes that the diver randomly turned out to be a pedo and vindicating him. Then when that failed, he tried to play it off as "of that's just a common south African generic insult, no one takes it literally", with no one banking him up on that one.

That's just Elon being petty and he was attacked first.

It was his trans daughter coming out and disowning him when shit started spiraling into the right wing must save the world from wokeness.

There's a big difference in being petty or vindictive or an asshole and this anti wokeness stuff which is going to cause great harm to society.

He always had the asshole/ petty thing going if you followed him before.

Also, I bet if we ever saw those 2 reconcile their relationship, we'd see a change in his public persona.

I'm not holding my breath on that one though.

He just became more public and we know him better. He's always been the same.

Nah, I have been in meetings with him before. While he was an asshole that I hated due to the way he treated my customer, he was really smart and spoke very lucidly and concisely. He had a vision and was doing everything he could to achieve it.

Nowadays it's like he has no coherent vision and is just doing whatever wild shit comes to his head. I think when he went from "barely a billionaire who spent it all and nearly went bankrupt" to "holy shit printing billions" then all guardrails came off and he let himself go free.

He got rich enough everyone said yes and or smiles. He lost the ability to have people be critical of him and never found someone to aid him.

That's a good point. Back in the day if he was leading a big brand to a cliff, others intervened and kicked him out and had the side effect of saving his reputation. Notably, it's probable his leadership would have destroyed PayPal, but others took the reigns away from him. So when Tesla pretty much made his name, folks simply noted his early leadership at PayPal and retconned attributing him with the crazy success, despite PayPal originally outcompeting the online payment company he was a part of, getting the leadership briefly nearly tanking it, and getting kicked out allowing it to flourish.

He's always been incompetent. He was fired from PayPal for that very reason. He's used his parents emerald business money to fabricate a career. He's paid his way into being the engineer he clearly idolized but couldn't actually earn himself. He bought Tesla, he bought Twitter, the "HyperLoop" was a hundred year old idea called a vac-train. Even the biggest selling point for SpaceX, were just plans NASA had decades ago but the technology didn't exist at the time to pull it off. I mean the Boring Company... we've been successfully digging subway tunnels for a long time... the London Underground opened in 1863. New York had theirs in 1904. Elon in 2018 debuted a claustrophobic tunnel that was less than 2 miles long...

If it wasn't for daddy's money, he would have been a nobody. But he bought his way into some sort of 'relevance' and has conned a lot of people who don't understand science out of a lot of money. His greatest accomplishment is being a great conman.

He fired his PR team a few years ago. That's been the difference.

He said plenty of dumb shit prior with people cleaning it up. One of my favorites was probably 10 years ago now. He claimed Model 3 assembly line automation would move so fast they'd have to worry about wind resistance.

My friends and co-workers still laugh about that one now. It's such an absurd "business" mentality of go fast = good. So go crazy fast = more good. With a technology that doesn't exist and kinda doesn't need to. It makes more sense to increase system capacity (multiple lines) when you're chasing throughput like that. But what makes even more sense is accurately forecasting your production so you don't have to slap a full car together in 30 minutes to keep up with demand.

What I heard when he first started turding Twitter, is that there was a decent team of execs and managers at Tesla that were able to manage him and keep him from mucking things up too much.

It makes to me that now he’s gotten a taste of being Head Twit, he’s used to there not being a team running interference for him and is just barreling through with all his cockamamie bullshit.

Go back with a decent pay bump (obviously he needs them) and with a plan to bolt ASAP. Continue your job search while you collect a higher temporary salary.

Terrible move from Elon as it shows he has no negotiating power.

I’d only do this if I was desperate. The company already showed they are willing to just pull the trigger at the drop of a hat and don’t give a fuck, even if I was still looking I’d be waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Oh yea, but you're already mentally out the door. You take extra cash and you just collect "easy money" while you shop around the resume or get you big moving plans finished up.

You could even take the job and see how hard you can half-ass it (extra points of you do literally no work) before they fire you again.

I'd go back if the pay bump was enough to cover anxiety about job uncertainty

"This is the single greatest talent acquisition opportunity since I founded EnviroSpark. Tesla had been able to scale their charging infrastructure due in no small part to the talented employees on the Supercharger team."

Half of them likely already have another job.

Considering it is only weeks after the government decided the entire EV industry has to use what the former employees created and ran...

What do you mean? The US is switching to NACS which is a standardized plug, Tesla superchargers will not be the only charging network to use it.

(At the time of the layoffs, Electrek reported that Musk got rid of the entire team because its Tinucci did not lay off enough workers on her own.)

This single anecdote tells you just about everything you need to know about how Elon Musk approaches any kind of interpersonal interaction. His emotional IQ is non-existent.

I can't imagine anyone that has decent prospects would agree to go back to Tesla after getting canned with those kinds of wild swings in decision making.

I can $ertainly think of a $cenario where I might con$ent to let bygone$ be bygone$ and go back to work for that a$$hole

Indeed know a guy who got played 9ff by big blue. He was the only one who could do his job so he has screwed them as a contractor for 500 a day 100% working from home and a loooooong termination clauses

Edit sorry this is in the UK not us

500 a day is $62.50/hr, that's not very good for contracting, especially if they don't take taxes and healthcare out. Any sort of key contractor like that ought to be worth at least $250/hr

Seriously, that's really low rates. Healthcare and all that overhead is usually at least double of the actual salary.

I charge $90(CDN), pay myself around $40. Solo contractor with occasional support staff.

Need to up my rate, it's a bit low for what I do, even though I'm no genius or expert specialist.

He should re-brand as a "consultant" and charge double that.

I need a 1yr salary sign-on bonus before I clock in. I also need full pay for 120 months after any form of departure from the company.

You know, since I can't trust the stability of the relationship.

Also, this new salary is going to be 8x what I was being paid previously.

Oh naturally.

I was just ironing out what I wouldn't be doing any work for.

I'd get that shit notarized and then quit. Take a 10 year vacation to academia or something. Get published. 🤷‍♂️

1 more...

It’s crazy how the US gov basically handed him a monopoly on EV charging infrastructure, something Rockefeller could have only dreamed of, and the guy throws it away less than two weeks later in some ketamine fuelled stupor. Then has to backtrack at the cost of reputation, confidence, and sentiment. Truly another great stable genius.

This is just getting stupid now. It seems Elon has totally lost his mind.

he's the 'ceo' of like 6 companies. Its clear he's spending all his time giving neonazis handjobs on xitter

Should just start referring to them as part time jobs. How much work can they be if he's supposedly doing multiple at once?

Just when you thought this couldn't get any more stupid.

A delusional billionaire toying with people’s lives. More at 11

The singular reason #Muskrat isn't living under a bridge & eating bath salts is that he was born rich.

Moral of the story: kids, be born rich and then you can live in a mansion and eat bath salts!

On actually developed countries there are laws that force employers to wait a year before they re-hire laid off employees. They can re-hire early but they have to pay a lot of money to the employee and an additional labor tariff in taxes. Precisely to avoid this kind of fuckery.

This is a sociopath testing fealty. He is deliberately abusing people in an attempt to show his power and diminish theirs. Remember when he tried to blame his sociopathy on autism thereby besmirching the disabled? I do.

But he just gave them all the power. He needs them. They can demand higher wages, better conditions, etc.

Nah. They now know he can fire them again.

If they're smart, they'll "work" for him while preparing to jump ship.

Were they trying to start a union or something?

They should just start their own Supercharger company... With blackjack and hookers

I suspect that somebody's smart, with a lot of money and not a lot of scruples (not that it's a factor here, I just hate rich people) is going to scoop them all up and either try to replace the standard, or if Elon is lucky, license it and leave the standard alone. Elon's not that smart though so he probably wouldn't agree to it.

I'd go back, put my feet on the desk and collect a little walkin around money, basically daring them to fire me again...

I’d go back and introduce enough backdoors to make them utterly incapable of staying in business. Steal all the documents. Then steal things. Then talk my way into being fired. Then start popping off the backdoors one at a time. Post all the documents for free. Something something shorting the stock.

if you need to work for someone else, you're not rich enough to flaunt laws that way and avoid jail

Announce large workforce cuts: line go up?

Announce large investment in workforce (even if it was just cut): line go up more?

I don't really get the logic that's going on the impulsive billionaire imbecile's mind.

Everyone being rehired to Tesla had better be asking for at least double for the trouble Musk put them through.

Someone probably reminded Elon of the giant government grant he took to expand the supercharger network and that he could make the company liable for losing all that money.

Yeah. I suspect they let him know he could have honest to goodness consequences for his actions.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Two weeks ago, Tesla CEO Elon Musk enacted widespread layoffs throughout the company, including the 500-strong team responsible for the brand's Supercharger.

Now, Tesla is looking to hire some of them back, Bloomberg reports, as Musk promises to spend $500 million expanding the network.

The layoffs also appeared to put Tesla's plan to build a more powerful charger that would benefit cars using 800 V or 900 V architectures, including Audi, Porsche, Lucid, and others, on hold.

But last week, Musk announced that Tesla would spend more than $500 million building out more chargers, just days after saying the focus would instead be on uptime at existing locations.

(At the time of the layoffs, Electrek reported that Musk got rid of the entire team because its Tinucci did not lay off enough workers on her own.)

In 2019, he decided to close all of Tesla's retail locations to pay for a cheaper version of the Model 3 sedan.

The original article contains 479 words, the summary contains 158 words. Saved 67%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

What are the job titles of the people on these teams? I would suppose physics and CS. How are those job sectors looking in terms of vacancies? I'd think that there are more workers than jobs and that this is a ploy to get less experienced people for cheaper but they're trying to rehire the same employees.