Musk-style operation: Tesla rehires some of the supercharging employees who were laid off in April

Wall Street Sights

2024-05-14 03:47Posted on the official account of Shanghai Wall Street

Immediately rehired after a major layoff? Musk's "repeated operations" shocked netizens.

On May 14, according to media reports, Musk abruptly laid off nearly 500 employees of the Supercharger team at the end of last month. However, it wasn't long before Tesla began to rehire those employees, with executives including Max de Zegher, director of North American charging, among the first to be rehired. It is not yet clear how many people will be rehired. Regarding this situation, neither Musk nor Max de Zegher responded to questions from netizens.

In this regard, netizens on social media platform X said:

"It's stupid to fire the Supercharger team. The number one reason people don't buy electric vehicles is because they are worried about the lack of charging stations. Sales in the U.S. will decline. ”

"It's more likely to bring back the best talent and keep the team motivated."

"Well done."

The Supercharger team is mainly responsible for managing and maintaining Tesla's charging stations, and Musk's layoff of this team has surprised many people, because Tesla's Superchargers are the company's "golden sign", and in 2012, Tesla launched the first batch of Superchargers. Now, Tesla has more than 6,200 charging stations and more than 57,000 charging heads around the world. According to the data, 8% of the global public charging demand last year was provided by Tesla.

In the last year, Tesla has also worked hard to promote its charging plug as the industry standard, and has signed agreements with many major automakers to make Tesla's charging network available to more electric vehicles. Still, the decision was initially met with a lot of criticism, leading Musk to later promise to invest more than $500 million this year to expand the charging network and improve the quality and uptime of existing charging stations.

Moreover, this is not the first time Musk has reversed his decision. In 2019, he announced that he would close most of Tesla's brick-and-mortar stores and move to online sales, but because landlords refused to break their leases, Tesla had to cancel the plan and raise the price of its vehicles. At the end of 2022, Musk had similar behavior on Twitter. He laid off about half of his employees at first, and then soon had some people back to work.

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