Tesla's chaotic layoffs leave employees nervous and wondering when the cuts will end

Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced job cuts on the evening of Sunday, April 14 . Spencer Platt/Getty Images and Taylor Hill/Getty Images

• Tesla employees say they’ve been left in limbo after a week of layoffs.
• Elon Musk announced a more than 10% cut in staff numbers at Tesla last week.
• After mass jobcuts on Monday, some layoff notices continued to trickle in.

In the wake of Tesla’s mass layoffs last week, some workers who are still at the carmaker say they feel as if they’ve been left in limbo.

“I keep waiting for Elon to send another email and tell us they’re finally done firing people,” one current Tesla worker, who requested anonymity to speak on the conditions of their employment, said. “We need some level of closure or a sign that we can stop worrying about losing our jobs.”

Tesla workers have been put through the wringer ever since layoffs started on Sunday, April 14. Even before the cuts started, some staff said they were nervous about potential downsizing because of a post on the anonymous site Blind that warned layoffs were coming. The post, which can only be viewed by verified Tesla employees, said that the EV company had asked some managers to identify workers for a cut that could impact as much as 20% of the company’s workforce. Some of the workers said they spent much of the weekend before layoffs refreshing their email, waiting to see if the rumors were true.

Then the hammer fell on Sunday night when Tesla CEO Elon Musk told staff in an internal email that the company planned to axe more than 10% of its workforce. Within a few hours, some workers learned they’d been laid off when they received a generic email that led with “Dear Employee,” others learned they’d been terminated when their access was cut off to Tesla’s internal systems or when they showed up at work, only to find out their badge didn’t work.

One worker compared the abrupt layoffs to a “Thanos snap.”

“It was like all at once, people you’d seen every day were just erased from the company,” the worker said.

The layoff notices kept trickling in

While many workers were notified they’d been impacted by the layoffs on that Sunday night or early Monday morning, the layoffs continued throughout last week, five workers told Business Insider. Last Tuesday, the layoffs hit some workers in China. On Friday, Tesla’s layoffs impacted its recruiting staff in the US. And on Monday, Bloomberg reported that Tesla’s new marketing team in the US had also been laid off.

Some teams that had been impacted during the round of layoff notices last Monday, were hit again later in the week when a few additional staff were cut, three workers from separate parts of the company told BI.

“On Monday were were all waiting to see if we’d been hit and then by Tuesday we thought we were in a good position and the worst was over. By the time I got the email Wednesday night, it came as more of a shock,” a worker, who was laid off last Wednesday, said.

One worker, who is in charge of a handful of direct reports, said that after the layoffs last Monday, they were told by their manager that upper-level management was unhappy with the number of people that had been laid off and wanted to make deeper cuts.

Several workers said the multiple days of layoffs created a level of uncertainty for workers and pushed some surviving staff to begin looking for work elsewhere.

“I wake up every morning and I check my email because I know if I can’t it means I’ve gotten the boot,” one worker said.

Another worker said they feel Musk and Tesla haven’t treated the issue with the proper respect, especially when it comes to the company’s decision to ask shareholders to vote on a $55 billion pay package for the Tesla CEO only a few days after laying off thousands of staff.

“The timing on Tesla asking voters to reinstate Elon’s pay package stings,” the worker said.

While some workers say the layoffs have created a major distraction at the company, at least two other current workers told BI they see it as a normal part of doing business.

“Layoffs are nothing new at Tesla. There was a purge in 2022 and this is probably just part of that natural cycle,” one current worker said.

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