All hell broke loose around Tesla’s Supercharging unit this week.
It started with Tesla — well, all of it pointed at Elon of course — laying off Rebecca Tinucci and reportedly all of the ~500 Supercharging team.
Most of the team seems to have gotten the news, as usual, suddenly and in the middle of the night. The Internet went abuzz as it always does. Now, I’m going to state the obvious here:
We don’t have all the information and gameplan yet,
and can mostly just speculate until the dust settles.
The information itself surfaced from a leaked memo, obtained by Steve LeVine at The Information, and then covered by most media outlets. Musk himself seemed angry at the leaks (link).
We don’t yet know if the SuperCharger teams outside US was also affected — so far reports and the posts from people being laid off have come from the US (like this, this, this, this, this or this one).
There is one post from the Southeast Asia team (link, thanks Electric Felix), and one business owner in Australia saying that their Tesla contact said their upcoming site will not be built as the Tesla Supercharger team has been dissolved globally. We’ll validate if the latter is actually the case or not.
What we do know is that with its 57,579 global Supercharger connectors at 6,249 locations (per Q1 2024), the Supercharger Network has been the ultimate benchmark for quality across the industry. It is sad to see most of the team behind that very success laid off. I have no doubt they’ll land well.
P.S. If you’re one of the people affected, or a company looking to hire that talent that suddenly became available, I saw one of our readers — Lindsay Warren, the founder of Net Zero Evolution — decided to provide their recruiting / introduction services for free for this month, globally, for the former Tesla Supercharging team members. I love this effort. Learn more here (link) or write directly to Lindsay at lindsay@netzeroevolution(dot)com.
Elon says why (kind of)
Now, for the context: you’ll want to know what Musk said on a few different spots that you won’t see reported, to get his thinking. I gathered some here, with the main comment from Musk:
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