Tesla announced mass layoffs, approximately 10 percent of all employees will be out of a job

According to an internal e-mail obtained by the Electrek portal, Tesla is said to be planning a major cut in the number of employees. After announcing a "year-over-year" drop in car sales for the first time since 2020 a few weeks ago, about 10 % employees at Tesla will be out of a job. That means at least 14,000 of the 140,473 employees that Tesla officially listed at its last earnings call. It is not yet known which teams or which employee profiles will be the target of the cuts.

"This is absolutely the last on the list of measures that we must take,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote in an email he released Electrek. In a later post on X, Musk wrote, “every 5 years we have to reorganize and prepare the company for growth again".

According to Bloomberg, this latest round of layoffs also includes senior executive Drew Bagliano, who is also leaving the company. Baglino confirmed this information on Xu. He has been part of the company for over 18 years, during which time he has held various roles, most recently as head of Tesla's powertrain and powertrain division. Among other things, Electrek noticed that the Tesla branding also disappeared from the X account of one of the key men of the legal department.

Today's (April 17) layoff announcement is the latest in a string of bad news for Tesla. The company has already announced before the quarterly presentation of results, which will be held on April 23, that their estimate of sales during this time period was not accurate. Already in January, however, they announced that sales growth would not be the way they wanted or expected it to be. All this is happening before the preparation for the launch of new vehicle models, and the question is how all this happening will affect Tesla's sales in the future.

Tesla is also reportedly abandoning its plans to produce an affordable Model 2, which would cost around $25,000, as it will instead focus on a new robot taxi. The company is facing increasing pressure from dwindling demand for its electric vehicles, while competition from Chinese manufacturers is intensifying. Last year, Tesla lost the title of the world's largest electric vehicle manufacturer when China's BYD aggressively took over the top spot by producing 3.02 million electric vehicles in the same time period, compared to Tesla's 1.81 million.