Tesla's 10 executives left in a month, and Musk returned to the car business with centralized power

Interface News

2024-05-15 19:05Posted on the official account of Beijing Jiemian News

Interface News Reporter | Zhou Shuqi He Miao

After several years of stability, Tesla's executive team is entering a period of dramatic change. Executives who have made outstanding contributions to Tesla have left in droves in a short period of time.

According to incomplete statistics from Jiemian News, since Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced global layoffs on April 15, 10 executives have announced their resignations in a month.

The latest one is Zhu Renjie, director of manufacturing engineering at Tesla's Texas Gigafactory. The engineer responsible for the Cybertruck's go-to-market and ramp-up announced on Monday that he was ending his five-year career in China and the United States. When Zhu Renjie joined Tesla in 2019, he led the establishment of the body manufacturing team of the Shanghai Gigafactory.

Zhu Renjie's departure comes at a time when Tesla is laying off new employees. On the same day, Tesla issued a notice to the relevant agencies of the U.S. government that Tesla plans to lay off another 601 employees in California. Tesla said last month that it would lay off 6,020 jobs in California and Texas.

Drawing: Interface News/He Miao

Someone needs to be held accountable for Tesla's declining performance, but it won't be Musk. Tesla's revenue in the first quarter of this year was $21.301 billion, down 9% year-on-year, less than the $22.31 billion estimated by analysts. This is Tesla's first quarterly revenue decline in nearly four years, and the largest decline since 2012.

Musk has recentralized power through continued changes in senior management, and his decentralized focus has returned to Tesla. One of the things that Musk has been criticized by the outside world in the past year is that he is only "part-time" as the CEO of Tesla.

Drew Baglino, senior vice president of energy and powertrains, one of Tesla's three core executives, is the first major executive to leave after Tesla announced a 10% global layoff. He has served Tesla for more than 18 years, and has been responsible for 4680 batteries, motors, drive units and other fields, and has had a profound impact on the company's technology strategy and product development.

The 4680 battery is one of Tesla's key R&D projects in the past four years, and it is also the core of its promotion to reduce manufacturing costs. However, as of March this year, the annual production capacity of 4680 batteries was only enough to assemble 60,000 Cybertrucks, and the performance and cost performance were not satisfactory.

According to the financial media LatePost, Tesla engineers were quoted as saying that during the research and development of the 4680, Musk believed that a usable battery should be made first and then continue to iterate, but Baglino insisted on breaking through the dry cathode technology process, rather than optimizing manufacturing efficiency in the transition plan.

In April, Musk had an unannounced meeting with Zeng Yuqun, chairman of CATL, during a brief visit to China that lasted less than 24 hours. A reasonable guess is that Tesla may consider switching from developing its own batteries to buying products from more suppliers.

Rohan Patel, vice president for public policy and business development, left Tesla on the same day as Baglino after 8 years of service for Tesla. It is reported that the Tesla public policy team led by him will also be disbanded. Jiemian News has learned that some employees of Tesla China's public relations team have also left.

A person close to Tesla revealed to Jiemian News that Musk was not satisfied with the effect of the layoffs that began in April, and increased the scope and intensity of the layoffs.

At the end of April, Musk fired the entire Supercharger team, including the highest-ranking female executive, Rebecca Tinucci. Daniel Ho, who was responsible for all new vehicles after being the project manager for the development of the Model S, Model 3 and Y, also left the company that morning.

In an email to the entire workforce, Musk wrote: "Hopefully, these actions make it clear that we need to remain absolutely firm in terms of headcount and cost cutting." While some executives are taking this seriously, most haven't done so yet. ”

Tesla's personnel turmoil has sparked employee discontent. In his departure post, the company's head of product launch, Rich Otto, said, "Great companies are made up of great people and great products, and the latter is only possible if people thrive." Recent layoffs have shaken the company and its morale, throwing this harmony out of balance, making it difficult to see long-term development. ”

The drastic layoffs launched by the global leader in the new energy vehicle industry have led to speculation about whether the order data it receives internally has reached an extremely bad level. The last time Tesla made a series of cost cuts and personnel changes was in 2019 when it was on the verge of bankruptcy, and the company is still sitting on $4.4 billion in free cash flow.

Musk also relocated Zhu Xiaotong, senior vice president of global manufacturing and sales in Europe and the United States, back to China to stimulate declining sales. The above-mentioned people familiar with the matter confirmed the news to Jiemian News.

Mei Songlin, a senior automotive industry analyst, commented to Jiemian News that this is the best move that Musk can make for China's sales performance.

Zhu Xiaotong's years of experience in China have given him a clear understanding of the needs of Chinese consumers, and his two years in the United States have also helped him understand what kind of technical support the U.S. headquarters can provide to the Chinese region. At the very least, the communication between the teams in China and the United States can be efficient and consistent. ”

Li Yanwei, an expert member of the expert committee of the China Automobile Dealers Association, is not optimistic about Zhu Xiaotong's return. The sales executive's past success is partly based on the explosion of demand in China's new energy vehicle market, and in the current context of fierce competition and overall slowdown in growth, it is difficult to fight the cycle with marketing alone. China is currently Tesla's sales and production center, not a global technology center.

Another potential sales growth pole for Tesla is the implementation of FSD, a fully self-driving software, in China. During Musk's visit to China, Tesla reached a partnership agreement with regulators and Baidu to grant it a license to collect data on China's public roads.

Jiemian News reporters experienced the FSD V12.4 version in the United States and found that Tesla's pure vision solution can accurately identify pedestrians and traffic light changes on the road, and respond to models that start suddenly, with smooth and comfortable braking. However, vehicles with Autopilot enabled are generally slow to drive and require human control of the steering wheel.

According to Gary Black, a well-known Tesla investor and managing partner of the Future Fund, data from credit card data provider YipitDate shows that only 2% of Tesla owners in the U.S. who received a one-month free trial of FSD chose to subscribe to the service after the trial period ended. Musk denied this data on social platforms.

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