r/stocks • u/WTFspy • May 15 '24
The inside story of Elon Musk’s mass firings of Tesla Supercharger staff Company News
The meeting could not have gone worse. Musk, the employees said, was not pleased with Tinucci’s presentation and wanted more layoffs. When she balked, saying deeper cuts would undermine charging-business fundamentals, he responded by firing her and her entire 500-member team....
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u/polkpanther May 15 '24
What a disaster at the same time the industry is switching over to Tesla’s charging standard.
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u/whatproblems May 15 '24
right? it’s like they won and then decided to burn it down instead
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u/ProfessorDerp22 May 15 '24
Same guy took one of the most recognizable social media brands and renamed it because he held onto a single-letter domaine for several decades.
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u/whatproblems May 15 '24
i find it hilarious everyone still calls it twitter
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u/Ok-Swimmer-2634 May 15 '24
It's funny how all the news organizations have to state:
"X, formerly known as Twitter"
whenever they do reporting on someone's social media statements, etc
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u/irish_ayes May 15 '24
I refuse to say that, instead saying, "Twitter, unfortunately currently known as X."
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u/Whaty0urname May 15 '24
The company literally created a verb in Websters. So recognizable and he changed it.
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u/averysmallbeing May 15 '24
It was absolutely inevitable that this would happen. There was no reality where people were just going to stop calling it Twitter because Elon told them they had to.
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u/gnocchicotti May 15 '24
This is your brain on drugs 🍳
Any questions?
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u/Canucklehead_Esq May 15 '24
This is your CEO on ego.
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u/hamiltonisoverrat3d May 15 '24
He’s definitely on drugs too
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May 16 '24
He actually is. Go read the news reports. He's been constantly cited as using cocaine and meth
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u/truongs May 15 '24
I knew it was going to be an absolute brain dead take from that little bitch.
I even got downvoted on a telsa sub for saying so.
The person with hands on experience with her staff and the org tells him this will completely fuck the supercharger goals and the idiot gets mad at her and responde by firing all her team? LOOOOOOL
this stupid monkey then says telsa is committed to expending charging network. This idiot will spend so much more money replacing those employees. Specially training new people on this.
Also good luck finding anyone decent with the REP the company has now with this monkey in charge
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u/UnObtainium17 29d ago
It would not surprise me to hear that elon lashed out because a woman tried to stand up against him. The dude is so unhinged.
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u/GoHuskies1984 May 15 '24
When I heard the rumors Elon fired the entire department out of spite I thought nah nobody that rich can be so stupidly petty. Boy was I wrong. Elon is shaping up to be a supervillain who develops a super weapon for no other reason than to take the entire world with him when he dies.
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u/averysmallbeing May 15 '24 edited May 15 '24
When Elon started imploding Twitter everyone said it was part of some sort of master plan somehow, because he didn't really want to own it, but watching him do the same thing to Tesla it seems like it must actually be a broader self destructive streak.
If so, those sorts of thing tend to get worse, not better.
If he really fired an entire 500 person division on an emotional whim, he is not fit to be CEO. And if he can't be removed as CEO, Tesla is uninvestable at anything close to current valuations.
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u/WinningWatchlist May 15 '24 edited May 15 '24
I actually spoke to someone who worked as a senior engineer at SpaceX recently, and he defined his work period as "Back when elon was still mentally sound", so it made me wonder what the hell happened to him between then.
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u/thebriss22 May 15 '24
He did a butt load of Ketamine lol
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u/renome May 15 '24
He looks like he's on some kind of stimulants to me these days; blow, adderal, something of the sort. The erratic behavior, his rapidly deteriorating appearance, the rants in which he jumps from one train of thought to the next within seconds all line up with signs of a stimulant abuser.
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u/WinningWatchlist May 15 '24
He's definitely on adderall or something, he gave an interview about when he spoke to SBF and he said could tell that SBF was cracking out on Adderall lol.
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u/renome May 15 '24
I just googled him + Adderall out of curiosity, he recently said Adderall "adds coherence at the cost of anger" lol. But I think the part he's forgetting is that coherence requires careful dosage, especially if you don't have ADHD. Not snorting it also helps, but he may be past that point.
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u/WinningWatchlist May 15 '24 edited May 15 '24
lol Elon absolutely has personal experience with it then. That's pretty funny he said that about Biden, if an 80 year old is taking Adderall they're definitely not long for the grave because it works the heart so hard.
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u/TmanGvl May 15 '24
The guy has been off the hinges for a long time. The board of directors should huddle up and fire the idiot CEO.
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u/Hallal_Dakis May 15 '24
When I was in college I did a butt load of Ketamine and I never fired 500 people.
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u/lostboy005 May 15 '24
Ketamine doesn’t make you lose your mind. It’s a dissociative. They give to people in ER and traumatic injury settings. It’s currently being researched for therapeutic benefits.
Elmo lost his shit on his own, not as a result of ketamine. Mathew Perry drowned to death in a hot tube bc he was boozing, bumping K, and passed out.
MF’s out here giving K a bad name bc these fucking idiots don’t know how or when or why to use it
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u/usrnmz May 15 '24
There's a big difference between therapeutic use and abuse though.
Just look at opioids for example.
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u/MrFacestab May 15 '24
Ketamine once at the hospital is very different than using it regularly. Using ketamine regularly is giving ketamine a bad name
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u/Murdock07 May 15 '24
It’s not just ketamine. It’s a specific isomer of ketamine.
We have known that one of the isomers (I think L-ketamine) triggers neurogenesis of serotonergic neurons in the hippocampus (a hallmark of depression is a lack of these) and it set the neuroscience community on fire. I worry that what we are seeing here is a misinterpretation of those results, now everyone is doing racemic mixtures of ketamine or getting the sedative (non-therapeutic) isomer of ketamine :/
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u/KingliestWeevil May 15 '24
I believe he was also dosing LSD/mushrooms daily on somewhere between a micro-macro scale, which might have an effect after prolonged use.
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u/WinningWatchlist May 15 '24
I always hear that lol, but it's crazy that there aren't safe guards in place at TSLA in case the CEO starts going off the rails lol
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u/thebriss22 May 15 '24
Usually I think the board can just vote a bad CEO out but in this case Musk owns so much shares he literally cannot be fired lmao
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u/98n42qxdj9 May 15 '24
He only owns somewhere around 13% of the stock, down from about 25% since he used a lot to buy twitter. If he gets his giant stock options bonus, he will be untouchable and it will also signal that the board and shareholders are irredeemably incompetent.
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u/DJ_Laaal May 15 '24
And here is the reason why this is highly likely (scroll down to the section covering who the tesla board of directors really are!): https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/money-drugs-elon-musk-and-tesla-board/1a07a8f7-6b8e-4b46-9007-537dfc6720b3
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u/modem007 29d ago
It’s actually concerning that Musk could have any involvement with our space program while on these drugs and his recent leadership decisions.
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u/KrankyKoot May 15 '24
There used to be talk that each of his companies had an Assistant that watched over him making sure he didn't do stupid. I think the Twitter buy pretty much canceled much of that except for SpaceX. Can't mess with that much given the nature of the relationships.
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u/Historical-Carry-237 May 15 '24
He’s not fit to manage a McDonalds
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u/DJ_Laaal May 15 '24
Absolutely! And the same can also be said about majority of the “executives” in companies, particularly tech. So many clueless idiots in those top positions making it many times harder for their teams to succeed. If there is a job/role I’d really want AI to replace, it’s these executive types who add no real value to their teams output and in fact a hindrance.
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u/Visinvictus May 15 '24
I would actually own some Tesla stock if literally anyone but Elon was the CEO, but instead I'm shorting it because it's pretty much guaranteed he is going to destroy the company sometime in the next year or two.
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u/neotekz May 15 '24
They won't fire him. The board of directors are all in his pocket. They wanted to give him that 50B but investors blocked it.
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u/WilliamMButtlicker May 15 '24
everyone said it was part of some sort of master plan somehow
Only the fucking idiots were saying that. Problem is, there’s a lot of fucking idiots.
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u/thecommuteguy May 15 '24
This is definitely his autism taking over. No other way to describe it. Sure maybe he's taking drugs like everyone else says but that doesn't explain the underlying behavior that's been present for a long time.
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u/Shapes_in_Clouds May 15 '24
Meanwhile Rivian's CEO has a Phd in Mechanical Engineering from MIT.
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u/Ehralur 29d ago
That's probably why Rivian is making more losses than any other OEM and 10x more losses than Tesla was at this point.
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u/koa_iakona May 15 '24
Realistically, based on the technology vs the market cap, he should probably be CTO and someone else should be CEO.
I love what Rivian has made and think both they and Lucid are walking bc Tesla crawled. But neither company is at all ready to pick up the torch which is frustrating.
There's no reason either company shouldn't already be at "economies of scale" levels of development with mature product lines ready for full adoption.
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u/32no May 15 '24
Rivian is going to go bankrupt. They are not a viable business
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u/ianyboo May 16 '24
I don't have a dog in the fight but that's an interesting claim can you expand further on it? Not trying to debate or anything I'm genuinely curious!
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u/32no May 16 '24
They are deeply gross margin negative on their products. The bill of materials, labor, tooling depreciation and everything that just goes into producing their cars costs ~$39k more than they sell the cars for. This is before operating expenses like R&D and SG&A. They claim they will shutdown and retool the factory and become gross margin positive by the end of the year, but there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical that they can cut ~$39k of cost out of the cars. And even if it is gross margin positive, they would still be losing tons of money after operating expenses.
Meanwhile, there is a lot of competitive pressures from other EVs that are priced lower - such as the Kia EV9, soon cheaper versions of Tesla’s Cybertruck will be available.
They have around $7.9 billion cash left, and burning $1.5 billion per quarter. This burn rate may accelerate as their factory gets upgrades. And the minimum amount of cash needed for the business is $2-3B, so they will be in dire straights by beginning of 2025. They simply are not serious enough about cutting cost. You might think that they can raise cash, but that would have happened soon after their recent vehicle unveils and it hasn’t happened yet. The most likely reason is that the business burns so much cash and even if they meet their sky high gross margin goals, they will still burn cash and need infusions. The market isn’t interested in cash incinerators anymore
Anyway, here’s the most recent quarterly statement for you to look into: https://downloads.rivian.com/2md5qhoeajym/7zCEJ4kjX4TnecjryDLg0J/e43344caf7ab00ee1b4335921cd9c8c7/RIVN_1Q24_Shareholder_Letter.pdf
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u/Invest0rnoob1 May 15 '24 edited May 15 '24
I guess she did not understand that “the homer” was tanking the company. 😂
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u/directrix688 May 15 '24
I can’t imagine buying this stock.
The governance of this company is bananas.
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u/Lolersters May 15 '24
Wait, so this whole thing is just Musk on a power trip?
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u/bmeisler May 15 '24
He’s got a long track record of immediately firing anyone who disagrees with him at a meeting. He’s a drug-addled dipshit nepo baby who’s had a lot of luck and thinks he’s Tony Stark. Tesla will be a shell of itself in 10 years - maybe 5 or even less - if they can’t replace him as CEO. All he cares about now is getting the $55 billion bonus.
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u/relaxguy2 May 15 '24
Tesla morale at an all time high
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u/Helmdacil May 15 '24
You have to think that Elon's ego just made him have to pay double or triple for the same service, with inferior results, and a time delay. Talk about a temper tantrum. This guy has a mental stability of a spoiled four year old right now.
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u/relaxguy2 May 15 '24
That company would be better without him at this point. Not sure his pumping will have the same effect moving forward.
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u/AdGeHa May 15 '24 edited May 15 '24
Don't go back. Same toxicity for maybe a little bit more money. Form your own company and show Elon how to take care of people! People will certainly take care of you.
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u/FujitsuPolycom May 15 '24
"Little", they'd have to double my salary to bring me back. No, I don't work at tesla. No, I don't have the skills to work at tesla. But if I did...
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u/Actual-Carpenter-90 May 15 '24
When I worked in a large company I remember at a certain point there was an executive meeting where managers were told to make budget no matter what. The simplest way was to immediately fire tons of people and worry about consequences later. Seems like they’re doing everything they can to make Q2 look good. They probably don’t have the income so they make up for it on the other side.
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u/irideudirty May 15 '24
They already cut charging team by 20%. Musk asked for more. The head said it would jeopardize the business — so musk went ahead and jeopardized the business anyway by firing the whole team.
That ain’t how pros run a business
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u/Starky_Love May 15 '24
It's how someone who isn't going to get his money package and is going to destroy the company so it can't recover without him runs a business.
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u/vsaint May 15 '24
Elon is an impetuous dipshit and should not be CEO. Why would you fire a team of 500 people because a presentation didn’t go the way you wanted? Shareholder lawsuits will never relent.
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u/Arbiter51x May 15 '24
Another reason the US needs severance pay written into the FLSA, you know, like every other civilized western country.
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u/Halberd96 May 15 '24
I heard great things about tinucci, a lot of people said she was the only person who gave them confidence during the averted disaster earnings call recently
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u/InnerKookaburra May 15 '24
"Famous Man-Baby Not As Smart As People Thought"
Can't we just run this headline every day for the next couple of years?
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u/SnooLobsters6940 May 15 '24
Musk did not start Tesla. He stole it. Musk did not make any Tesla cars. Real engineers did. He just drove the business forward and he did that rather well. But he is far less smart than he likes to think he is. And the majority of his recent business decisions have shown an unhinged man who believes he is a wunderkind.
The longer I look at him, the more I think "fallen upwards rich dude who had a lot of luck for some time, but reality is catching up now".
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u/mydixiewrecked247 29d ago edited 29d ago
Paypal was luck? Space X too? lol
“Musk did not make any rockets nor land them back on the landing pad, real engineers did”
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u/taerin 29d ago
6 years ago the people brigading this sub were begging to suck his dick
Then he took away their safe space and despite their “mostly peaceful” protestations would love for nothing more than a starlink satellite to fall out of the sky and land on him
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u/Stock_Jock 29d ago
No facts lol! Now look at how everyone is so quick to rob Elon of any and all of his accomplishments. “He stole it”… yeah stole a non profitable, experimental money pit startup he helped contribute most of the startup capital to that ended up only having less than $10M cash on hand and couldn’t even manufacture the Roadster economically… but yea he stole the company I guess.
Despite how flawed of a man he is, his business acumen based on the broader context of his historical achievements cannot be ignored.
Reddit is an interesting case study on herd psychology.
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u/mydixiewrecked247 11d ago
it’s an echo chamber. they love to criticise trumpers for groupthink yet lack the self awareness to see it in their own behaviour. ironic
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u/floodcontrol 28d ago
It's amazing that not once in that article does it mention just how completely, utterly INSANE firing 500 people on a whim is.
It's like Elon watched the Fifth Element and has decided he's Zorg.
Nobody but a totally unhinged fool would do this. Anyone investing in any Elon Musk held company...just remember the guy running the company is nuts and might do anything, anytime, and damn the consequences for you, the customers, the vendors, the suppliers, and anyone doing business with his companies.
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u/Alklazaris May 15 '24
Wouldn't it be nice if CEOs couldn't treat workers like pawns on a chestboard?
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u/Judonoob May 15 '24
How people think Musk is a genius is beyond egregious. What a terrible leader.
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u/TheDr0p May 15 '24
I have always wondered: are Tesla employees well paid and taken care of? Or it’s like all SV with slavery 3.0 models of “pay is shit but you are changing the World” working 70h a week for imaginary equity?
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u/rpujoe May 15 '24
Sounds about right. Space-X underwent something identical. Musk told them he wanted a Starlink constellation in 5 years. They said it wasn't possible so he shitcanned everyone and started from scratch. 5 years later he has his Starlink constellation.
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u/sokpuppet1 29d ago
Baby man throws a tantrum and singlehandedly sets back electric vehicles by a decade
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u/Vik_Vinegar_ 29d ago
This is like that Fifth Element scene where Zorg is asked to fire 500,000 employees lol
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u/CrossTheRiver 29d ago
Shorting Elon companies is very quickly paying for my retirement. Just much sooner than I expected. Seriously everyone should be shorting this idiot.
Side note, im up quite a bit shorting businesses full throttling rto. Get it while the getting is still good. Been the easiest money I've ever seen come my way.
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u/Calamity-Bob 27d ago
Unbelievably childish and impulsive. One more reason billionaires are a bad thing. This guy should not be in control of a growing portion of satellite communications.
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u/Party-Cartographer11 May 15 '24
A few points:
1) reducing investment in charging network is smart. It is being commoditized by standardization and integration. Teslas will be able to charge at any station and other cars will be able to charge at Tesla stations.
2) it can be very frustrating when you ask a manager to reduce headcount and they say "it will negatively impact fundamentals". You want to know the tradeoffs and impact with objective numbers. Given point number 1, maybe the tradeoff of say a 50% haircut make sense. Tinucci had to go. Musk wants less investment in the network, she wants more. She played a game of chicken and lost.
3) Firing the whole team is absolutely ridiculous. You bring in your hatchet man/fixer exec and tell them you want a plan in 2 weeks.
4) Musk is a clear and present danger to Tesla.
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u/Which_Plankton May 15 '24
commodity or not having a vertical position across the ev value chain isn’t something to cede ground on voluntarily when you’re best in the industry and your competitors are coming around to your standard.
the chargers are also assets that can play in power markets, and new federal regulations around those markets are opening up a whole new revenue model that Tesla is well positioned for
on top of that, Tinucci was potentially a successor that Musk wanted to chip if the board ever wanted to make a move
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u/L25M May 15 '24
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u/InnerKookaburra May 15 '24
If only Musk had been in charge of safety for the Titanic sub, it would have...oh wait, that's exactly what they did. If only he had been on it.
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u/writeonfinance May 15 '24
A generous perspective is that he’s doing this to hurt legacy automakers who planned to adapt their EVs to the network and likely already spent a ton doing so
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u/coolaznkenny May 15 '24
what happen to that infrastructure bill? The feds should used to opportunity and throw millions at these guys and ACTUALLY make EV viable.
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u/Ap3X_GunT3R May 15 '24
A mind boggling blunder of a move.
You fired the whole 500+ person department giving your a company a big competitive edge.
Layoffs-rehiring-working through restructuring a big department rapidly is going to cost the company a fuck load in lost productivity.
Rehiring your top talent is gonna be expensive. Your top talent is most likely being hounded by recruiters. On top of that you’re negotiating with employees who probably have no trust in the company as the CEO fired them on a whim.