Tesla tells some laid-off employees their separation agreements are canceled and new ones are on the way

Tesla CEO Elon Musk weighed in on the severance offered to laid-off staff earlier in the week. Antonio Masiello/Getty Images

• Tesla sent notices canceling some separation agreements, according to two laid-off employees and a notification seen by Business Insider.
• Elon Musk previously stated some severance packages were “incorrectly low.”
• The cancellations came after some workers received severance offers for two months of pay.

Some laid-off Tesla workers received a notification that their separation agreements had been canceled on Thursday and to expect new ones, two laid-off workers told Business Insider.

The workers received a notification about a document titled “Your separation agreement,” with “status: canceled,” according to one of the emails obtained by BI. The notification said: “Canceled by sender: Cancelling to send updated agreement,” according to a screenshot of the message. The email appears to be an automatic email from Adobe’s Acrobat Sign e-signature tool.

The notification comes after Elon Musk sent a companywide email to current Tesla employees on Wednesday, saying that “some severance packages are incorrectly low.”

“My apologies for this mistake. It is being corrected immediately,” Musk said in the email that was viewed by BI.

Some of the former employees who received the notification had been previously offered two months of severance. The severance packages didn’t appear to be weighted based on the length of time workers had been with Tesla, as workers with anywhere from a few months to several years at Tesla received the same number of weeks paid out, five sources who received the offers told BI.

Other workers told BI that as of Thursday afternoon, they’d still yet to receive any information about severance packages.

Under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, companies that have more than 100 workers are required to provide 60 days of notice before a large-scale layoff. Violations of the WARN Act can entitle workers to up to 60 days of pay and benefits if they’re not given proper advanced notice.

Musk announced he planned to cut more than 10% of Tesla’s workforce on Sunday night. Impacted workers received emails notifying them they’d been terminated within a few hours of Musk’s internal announcement.

A spokesperson for Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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