Liam Denning, Columnist

Tesla’s Job Cuts Bring the Shock of the Ordinary

To justify its nosebleed valuation, the electric-car maker should be growing, not pulling back.

January 18, 2019 at 1:54 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

A Tesla charging station.
Photographer: Sean Gallup/Getty Images Europe

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Just over a week ago, Elon Musk was tweeting about flying cars. On Friday, he did something much more like a run-of-the-mill car executive: He announced layoffs.

Tesla Inc. is cutting 7 percent of its full-time staff. This follows a 9 percent cut in the middle of last year. Remarkably, despite that earlier round of reductions, Musk said in his latest update that headcount expanded 30 percent last year. Having ended 2017 with about 37,500 employees, the CEO tweeted an updated figure of 45,000 last October. So the latest cuts should affect around 3,000 to 3,500 people.