Tesla’s Supercharger Department to Lay Off Around 500 Employees, Stock Price Drops Nearly 6%

After announcing a global workforce reduction plan of 10%, American electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer Tesla has laid off hundreds of more employees. The Supercharger department within the company took the hardest hit, with almost the entire team being let go.

According to reports from The Information, Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk stated in an email sent to top executives on Monday, April 30 that the Senior Director of Supercharger, Rebecca Tinucci, and the Director of New Products, Daniel Ho, would be leaving the company on Tuesday.

Rebecca Tinucci’s team of 500 employees in the Supercharger department will see the majority of its members leaving, with only a few employees being reassigned to other roles.

In the email, Musk expressed dissatisfaction with Tesla’s management for not promptly reducing the company’s workforce according to his instructions.

Current and former employees of the company told CNBC that Tesla had started laying off employees as early as January of this year, and the layoffs have intensified this month. Some colleagues who believed their jobs were safe received termination notices on both Friday and Tuesday.

Tesla did not give any advance warning to investors about the personnel reduction, nor did it provide any alerts to partners in the charging network, including small to medium-sized businesses that install and maintain electric vehicle charging equipment at crucial locations in the United States.

Andres Pinter, CEO of Supercharger network contractor Bullet EV, told CNBC, “My team got kicked hard this morning. All the emails we sent to over 20 construction contacts for charging stations bounced back, saying ‘This email address is no longer valid. Any emails sent to this address in the future will not be received.'”

Every three public electric vehicle charging stations in the United States are operated by Tesla. This move indicates that Tesla is slowing down the expansion of its Supercharger network in the country.

In February of last year, Tesla announced the opening of its North American charging stations to all vehicle owners. In the following months, companies like Ford and General Motors announced plans to update the software and hardware in their electric vehicles to be compatible with Tesla’s charging stations.

Musk posted on the X platform on Tuesday, stating, “Tesla still plans to develop the Supercharger network, but the pace of new site construction will slow down, focusing more on the 100% uptime and expansion of existing charging stations.”

This round of layoffs is part of Tesla’s major cost-cutting measures following a 9% drop in revenue in the first quarter of this year, marking the largest decline since 2012.

In the first quarter of this year, Tesla’s profits decreased by half due to discounts and incentives to boost demand.

After Musk’s visit to China last weekend, Tesla’s market value rose by around $82 billion on Monday, April 29. However, following the news of the layoffs, Tesla’s stock price fell by 5.55% on Tuesday, with a year-to-date decline of over 25%.