Tesla's Firing Even More Employees as Crisis Deepens

The cuts are getting deeper and deeper.

Head Count

Electric vehicle maker Tesla has been hit by round after round after round of layoffs over the past month or so, to the degree that it's somewhat hazy exactly how many employees have been affected.

And the cuts keep piling up, with CNBC now obtaining government paperwork through a public records request that shows the company is slashing another 600 jobs at its facilities in California, running the gamut from factory workers to highly qualified engineers.

The implication of CNBC's reporting is that the full extent of Tesla's cuts may end up being drastically higher than the 10 percent headcount reduction CEO Elon Musk warned about at the outset of the cullings back in April. As the network points out, Musk claimed in an April earnings call that "inefficiency" at the company was running between 20 and 30 percent, suggesting that the seemingly ongoing sackings could come to total nearly a third of the company's previous workforce of more than 140,000 at the end of last year.

Masterful Gambit

It's striking to watch Tesla writhe and contract, because just a few years ago it was on top of the world, having seemingly demonstrated not only that it could make electric vehicles a red-hot status symbol but that it could produce them at scale.

Things have soured since then, though. Maintenance and reliability for the vehicles have proven to be more painful than initially expected, sapping consumer interest, at the same time that cheaper alternatives are emerging overseas.

And hovering over the entire mess is Musk himself, whose antics since buying X-formerly-Twitter have raised questions about his business acumen at the same time that he's aggressively pushed Tesla's incomplete self-driving and robotics efforts while hyper-publically embracing a menagerie of conspiratorial and rightwing positions that seem to have alienated the company's core buyers.

"It got to the point where we felt like we were driving around in a QAnon-MAGA hat, as if Tesla had become a symbol of white supremacy," one former Tesla owner explained last year.

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