Tesla Tells Excited Young Interns That Their Internships Have Been Canceled

Students are left scrambling for internships on LinkedIn.

Cruel Summer

College interns often serve as seed corn for companies looking to groom these youngsters to become future leaders for the business.

So it's a bad sign that Tesla is rescinding summer internship offers just weeks before they start, Bloomberg reports, sending more signals that all is not well at CEO Elon Musk's car company, which has been hit by sweeping layoffs in recent weeks.

Some of these would-be Tesla interns logged on LinkedIn to air their woes and ask if anybody can offer them an alternative internship for the summer, according to the news outlet.

"At 8:46am, I opened a Tesla email for flight info," wrote Miami University in Ohio student Joshua Schreiber in a LinkedIn post that went viral Wednesday. "By 11:25am, my internship offer was gone."

Another would-be intern, Brook Gura from The University of Texas at Austin, also posted about her Tesla internship being rescinded.

"This summer, I was excited about the opportunity to work as an intern for Tesla," she wrote. "Yesterday I received a call that, with just three weeks to my start date, my offer was rescinded as part of the company's #masslayoffs."

House on Fire

An untold number of internships are impacted. A 2022 Tesla report noted that the company offers more than 3,000 internships to college students per year.

The revoking of internships is especially troubling because, as Bloomberg notes while citing data from Glassdoor, some of these positions either pay $18 to $28 per hour or are unpaid positions — the lowest positions available at the company, in other words.

It's just another sign that things are pretty grim at Musk's car company, which has been roiled by layoffs and key executives leaving, amidst a broader flatlining of sales for electrical vehicles.

It doesn't help that Musk seems to be overextended, with his focus pulled towards his commercial space outfit SpaceX and the social media platform X-formerly-Twitter.

Instead of righting the ship at Tesla, he appears to be busy posting on X, complaining about this week's campus protests on the Gaza conflict or opining on birth rates.

This constant divisive posting has almost certainly cost him car customers. After saying many times about how he hates California, residents in the Golden State have cooled to the carmaker with Tesla vehicle registrations ticking down in the previous quarter.

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