Sandy's take on the Tesla Layoffs!

Oh goodness. 1. Sales and marketing? What are you even talking about with other OEMs being the customer? For what product? The drivers are the customers for Superchargers. 2. Just because a product is excellent doesn’t mean that it doesn’t need to evolve. Superchargers are very good, but the specs are 5 years behind with being limited to 500V and 350A continuous. 3. Efficiency absolutely drops if morale is terrible. 4. Who will be managing the building the of new Superchargers? Who will negotiate leases? Can’t add more stalls to a site that doesn’t have more utility capacity. 5. It is not the right thing to do for anyone. Not saying there weren’t some layoffs needed, but laying off the entire Supercharger team is crazy. 6. Fiduciary duty? I don’t think a whole lot of sane shareholders agree with the whole Supercharger team being axed. 7. So other OEMs are stupid for doing layoffs but Elon is an all-knowing genius? The other OEMs will be in trouble for doing layoffs but not Tesla? 8. Not going to get into the nonsensical politics here on the Fed or media… 9. The great engineering of the cars that you’re talking about is due to Tesla having very smart engineers. Not because of Elon. 10. This is not good business or planning. 11. Newspapers? lol. 12. Elon is not the greatest person on the planet. Not even close. His teams have accomplished great things and he has enabled them. That is all. 13. Rear wheel steering has been around for 20 years. 14. SpaceX, Boring Company, Tesla accomplishments are the work of very talented teams. Not just Elon. 15. Elon is not the man of the century. C’mon Sandy. You’re better than this.

With all due respect, Sandy misunderstands the supercharger layoffs. It was not sales, marketing, or engineers that were laid off. It was mostly project designers, developers, and construction managers. These are the people who are responsible for deploying new chargers. What do they do? They negotiate with landlords to lease space for the chargers, design the site, hire construction contractors, go to town zoning board meetings and get the projects permitted, work with utilities to go through the interconnection process, manage the construction, commission the site, and manage communications. Tesla was deploying ~1,500 new supercharger locations per year globally and tens of thousands of ports. It takes a significant team of people to do that.

@Tesla This has to be rage bait. You can’t possibly be serious.

@Tesla Rage bait, is that a thing?

@Tesla Respectfully disagree. 1. Most chargers don’t have overhead to expand locations 2. Big brands like Hyundai/Kia committed to NACS due to Tesla promising higher voltage stations. Tesla hasn’t even begun building V4 cabinets (only stalls) 3. CyberT is waiting on those too

@Tesla When you are at the top you become the target

@Tesla With respect, did you really just say that R&D isn’t needed because chargers are as good as it gets? So you’re saying we need a revolution in batteries with dramatically better charge curves. It’s one or the other, because the current speeds will never overtake the gas market.

@Tesla How large is your $TSLA holding, @teardowntitan?

@Tesla This might go down as the most bizarre thing I've seen from the Tesla community yet.

@Tesla Love Sandy's no nonsense approach to business and product development. 👍