In a move regarded as intensifying cost-cutting, Tesla has closed its office in San Mateo, California and fired about 200 staff who were working on its Autopilot driver-assistant system there, one of the sources told.
According to that person, hourly workers made up the majority of those who were let go.
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, informed top managers at the beginning of this month that the company needs to reduce personnel by roughly 10% due to his “very awful feeling” about the state of the economy.
Later, the billionaire claimed that only salaried employees would be affected by the 10% reductions and that the number of hourly employees will continue to rise.
According to Raj Rajkumar, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, “Tesla certainly is in a huge cost-cutting mode.”
This (employee reduction) most certainly indicates that the company had a difficult second quarter of 2022 as a result of the Shanghai shutdown, rising raw material prices, and supply chain issues.
Tesla’s production in Shanghai has been hindered by anti-pandemic measures.
Employees at the satellite office had previously been informed that they will transfer to an office in Palo Alto in stages starting this month once the San Mateo lease expired, according to the laid-off source who spoke to Reuters. But yesterday saw the majority of the employees let go.
Many employees at Tesla’s San Mateo office are involved in data annotation, which involves going over and identifying various pictures gathered from Tesla vehicles to instruct the Autopilot systems in the cars how to handle different types of driving situations.
On Tuesday, several Tesla data annotation staffers posted on Linkedin that they had been fired.
“So today was sort of a letdown. I recently lost my job at Tesla along with practically the whole San Mateo Branch, “A data annotation specialist named Caeser Rosas stated on Linkedin.
Tesla’s new facilities in Texas and Berlin, according to Musk, are “gigantic money furnaces” that are losing billions of dollars each year.