According to an internal email that Reuters has seen, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has a “very awful feeling” about the condition of the economy, and as a result, he is considering putting a recruiting freeze in place as well as cutting up to 10 percent of the company’s workforce.
At the moment, Tesla has around 5,000 job opportunities that are being posted all over the world, and it has 100,000 workers. Late on Thursday, an email with the subject line “stop all hiring globally” was sent to officials at Tesla. This comes only a few days after Elon Musk ordered all staff to return to the office for at least 40 hours a week or risk instant firing.
After hours, the announcement caused a 3 percent decrease in Tesla’s stock price. The corporation as a whole and Musk in particular did not respond to the Guardian’s requests for comment.
There has not been a significant decrease in demand for Tesla automobiles or any other electric vehicles as of now. The typical warning signs of an impending recession, such as rising dealer inventories and increased incentives in the United States, have not yet materialised.
But since the billionaire used his shares to finance a proposed acquisition of Twitter, which looks to have stalled for the time being, Tesla’s price has been pummelling, plummeting 22 percent since the beginning of the year. Concerns over the state of the international economy and the influence of China’s Covid-19 shutdown in Shanghai, which is the location of a Tesla plant, have both contributed to a decline in the share price of the firm.
Some people had hypothesised that Musk’s directive to report back to the office was part of an underhanded plan to reduce the number of employees. After fast expansion caused by the epidemic, Tesla staff employees commented on message boards that their offices did not have the physical capacity to host all staff members full-time. One employee asked for guidance about whether they should disregard the directive or walk in and work from the staircase.
In the email he sent to employees upon their return to the workplace, Musk stated, “The more senior you are, the more obvious your presence must be.” “That is why I lived in the factory so much – so that people on the line could see me working alongside them,” I said, “since I was right there with them.” Tesla would have declared bankruptcy a long time ago if I had not intervened in that situation.
The IG Metall union in Germany has stated that it will back any worker who wishes to continue working remotely and has committed to doing so. According to the district chairman for the union, who spoke to Reuters, “anyone does not agree with such one-sided demands and wants to stand against them has the force of unions behind them in Germany,” There are 4,000 employees working for Tesla in Germany.
The email from Musk on employment layoffs was sent a day after the bitcoin exchange Coinbase declared a complete recruiting freeze and revealed it would also be rescinding job offers that had previously been accepted by candidates. According to a weblog written by the business’s chief people officer, LJ Brock, “This is not a choice we make lightly,” but it is vital to guarantee that the company is only expanding in the areas that are of the highest significance. “We have always been aware that crypto would be unpredictable; nevertheless, this volatility, in conjunction with wider economic issues, may put the firm, as well as us personally, to the test in unprecedented ways.”
Brock stated in the letter that was addressed to prospective employees who had not yet begun working for the firm that Coinbase would provide a severance package equal to two months’ worth of salary. We are also making a commitment to give additional support in the form of a specialised talent hub in order to help deliver high-quality job search advantages.
The business is facing the impact of several pricey blunders in addition to the larger IT slowdown and a dramatic decline in the cryptocurrency market, which Coinbase’s chief executive has dubbed as a “crypto winter.” An NFT marketplace was released in the beginning of May, which was many months after the market’s peak, and it only garnered 150 transactions on its first day of operation.
