Tesla Said to Lay Off 200 Employees
Tesla has shuttered its office in San Mateo, California and laid off roughly 200 employees working on its Autopilot driver-assistant system there;
one of the people told Reuters, in a move seen as accelerating cost-cutting.
Most of the laid-off people had been hourly workers, that person said.
Read also: OnePlus 10T Colour Options, Up to 12GB RAM Tipped Again
Early this month, Chief Executive Elon Musk told top managers he had a “super bad feeling” about the economy and that the maker of electric cars needed to cut staff by about 10 percent.
Later, the billionaire said that the 10 percent cuts would apply only to salaried workers and that hourly staff numbers were still expected to grow.
“Tesla clearly is in a major cost-cutting mode,” said Raj Rajkumar, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.
“This (staff reduction) likely indicates that 2Q 2022 has been pretty rough on the company due to the shutdown in Shanghai, raw material costs and supply chain problems.”
Read also: Nothing Phone 1 Confirmed to Be Powered by Snapdragon 778G+ SoC
Anti-pandemic measures in Shanghai have depressed It’s production there.
The laid-off person who spoke to Reuters said employees at the satellite office had previously been told that they would move to an office in Palo Alto;
in stages beginning this month after the San Mateo lease expired. But most of the workers were laid off on Tuesday.
“It was definitely kind of numbing,” he said. “Yeah, we’re definitely shocked; we’re definitely blindsided.”
Some workers expected them to shift some of the jobs to lower-wa
ge workers in Buffalo, New York, to save costs.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Many people in Tesla’s San Mateo office work on data annotation — reviewing and labelling various visuals collected from Tesla vehicles to teach the cars’
Read also: WhatsApp Found to Be Testing Memoji-Like Avatars for Video Calls and more
Autopilot system how to handle certain kinds of road scenarios.
A number of Tesla data annotation employees said on Linkedin on Tuesday that they had been laid off.
“So kind of a disappointing day today. Myself along with almost the whole San Mateo Branch at Tesla just got laid off,” Caeser Rosas, a data annotation specialist, said on a Linkedin post.
Bloomberg first reported about the San Mateo job cuts.
Musk has also said Tesla’s new factories in Texas and Berlin are “gigantic money furnaces” losing billions of dollars.
