"[B]ut I didn't feel like my role was redundant."

End of the Line

Picture this: you're an employee for Tesla and the company asks you move to a new state, far from your family and friends.

Then, just six months after your major move, you can't clock in and you're locked out of your work computer.

That's exactly what unfortunately happened to a former Tesla employee on Sunday night, Business Insider reports, along with more than 10 percent of the automaker's workforce — the latest warning sign that all is not well at CEO Elon Musk's electrical car company amid the overall weakening of the electrical vehicle sector.

The former worker confirmed the layoffs after finding a generic letter about the reduction in the Tesla workforce in their personal email inbox.

"I feel like Tesla could have handled the layoffs better," they said. "It was impersonal and abrupt."

Cooling Market

This former employee's layoff doesn't sound particularly well thought out, either. Tesla had asked them to move to an area lacking certain service technicians, the same job the ex-worker fulfilled, and yet the layoff letter announced that they were being let go due to "redundancy."

"[B]ut I didn't feel like my role was redundant," said the worker, who had to uproot not just themselves but also their two school-age kids away from friends.

The sacking comes amid broader signs that the electrical vehicle market is suffering. After experiencing huge increases in sales, the EV sector fell by 7.3 percent in cars being sold for this first quarter compared to the last quarter of 2023.

Tesla's market share also fell from 62 percent in the beginning of 2023 to 51 percent now due to increased competition from older stalwarts such as Ford and Hyundai as well as international EV sellers like China's BYD. This is reflected in sales figures: Tesla car purchases decreased by 13.3 percent in the first quarter of this year compared to last year.

Along with the loss of market share, Tesla's stock has also fallen more than 38 percent over the last six months, a rocky period marked by news of Tesla's Cybertruck quality issues, along with Musk's erratic behavior at his other company X-formerly-Twitter.

It's a given that increased competition from other automakers would cut into Tesla market share, but it doesn't help that Musk has been an apparently distracted CEO — distraction that seems to bleed into everything at the company, down to how individual employees were let go.

More on Tesla: As Tesla Conducts Mass Layoffs, Elon Musk Asks for Huge Bonus


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