DBT Bureau
Bengaluru, 15 April
In the latest round of layoffs among big US corporations, Tesla will fire more than 10% of its staff, or around 14,000 employees as it looks at saving costs and improving productivity.
The company’s CEO Elon Musk has sent out an email to employees to inform them about the impending layoffs.
“Over the years, we have grown rapidly with multiple factories scaling around the globe. With this rapid growth, there has been duplication of roles and job functions in certain areas. As we prepare the company for our next phase of growth, it is extremely important to look at every aspect of the company for cost reductions and increasing productivity,” Musk wrote in the internal email sent to staffers.
“As part of this effort, we have done a thorough review of the organization and made the difficult decision to reduce our headcount by more than 10% globally,” he wrote.
Tesla is grappling with falling sales and intensifying competition in the electric vehicle space. The proposed layoffs are likely to reduce costs for the company and enable it to compete better in the marketplace. These dismissals were effective immediately as per the internal communique.
According to the US SEC filing, Tesla had over 140,000 employees at the end of 2023.
Global corporations including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and many others have been reducing their headcount since 2023 as post-pandemic induced demand waned for multiple services.
A report by Bloomberg citing Layoffs.fyi said that around 32,000 tech employees have lost their jobs in 2024 so far.
Apart from over-hiring during the post-pandemic days, the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) is also driving the layoffs across big corporations. Though no company has said in public about how many jobs are getting replaced owing to AI, experts are of the opinion that automation is replacing human beings across organisations.
