Tesla has dismantled its billing team in a new round of layoffs, despite recently beating out major automakers like Ford and General Motors and making its connection the de facto standard in North America.
Tesla’s Supercharger network has long been considered one of its biggest competitive advantages. It’s widely available, has much better uptime than other charging networks, and the connection technology — known as the North American Charging Standard, or NACS — is now adopted by virtually every major automaker with a presence in North America.
CEO Elon Musk announced the new layoffs in an overnight email to executives, first mentionted from The Information, in which he said he wants leaders to be “absolutely tough on headcount and cost-cutting” as he ordered them to cut more employees who “obviously don’t pass the excellent, necessary and reliable test” or resign. Senior director of EV charging Rebecca Tinucci and head of new vehicles Daniel Ho are out, according to The Information.
TechCrunch has confirmed with sources that the entire global billing organization has been let go. The move was unexpected and “obviously a surprise to everyone,” a source at a major automaker told TechCrunch.
Will Jameson, one of the charge team leaders, left the cuts, he told a Position on Musk’s X social media platform that he has “let the entire charging organization go.”
“What this means for the charging network, NACS and all the exciting work we’ve been doing across the industry, I don’t know yet. What a wild ride that has been,” he wrote.
The cuts are so complete that Musk even suggested in the email that the company will slow its expansion of the Supercharger network, writing that Tesla will “continue to build some new Supercharger locations, where they are critical, and complete those under construction”.
Musk is also disbanding Tesla’s public policy team, according to reports. Rohan Patel, the former vice president of that group, left the company two weeks ago at the same time these layoffs were announced. Patel called it the “best policy/bizdev team in the business” at the time in a message to TechCrunch. “I know I’m extremely biased, but honestly the people who were on my team are just amazing,” she wrote.
Tesla’s policy team is largely responsible for the company winning about 13% of the funding available from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, and until recently it was pursuing another federal grant of nearly $100 million to fund the construction of a charging corridor for the company’s still under development electric big rig.
Those cuts come just two weeks after Musk announced that Tesla is laying off more than 10 percent of its workforce as part of a company-wide restructuring aimed at “hitting the wall on autonomy.” The company is coming off a brutal first quarter where profits fell 55% due to weaker EV sales. At the same time, the company’s Board of Directors is tries to restore Musk’s $56 billion pay package that was struck down by a judge and the CEO has publicly threatened to develop AI technology at the xAI startup unless it is given even more control of Tesla.
