But these were the cream of the crop - the best of the best of the best. And this is Tesla, which is managed by no Welch-like MBA. How could 80% of the staff be permitted to rot?
How is it efficient to fire the people you want to keep, then rehire them weeks later, rather than just not firing them in the first place?
But isn’t that also good for the overall mission? Those superior people will find jobs at other DCFC companies, they will install lots and lots of DC fast chargers all across the world, and all those new EVs being sold will have plenty of places to charge, which will reduce range anxiety, which will increase penetration of EVs, which will lead to growing sales (at Tesla and other manufacturers).
The folks that worked at Tesla for 6, 7, or 10 years are not frightened or desperate. Their options on the way out were worth many millions, and for a few of the senior guys were even worth tens of millions. Most of them only work because they choose to work.
No one is perfect, not even
The Captain
Someone asked Satchmo to explain the blues. Satchmo replied, “If I have to explain the blues you’ll never get it.” (or words to that effect)
The Captain
Business people have no end of excuses, whimsical stories, and pretensions to “business acumen” to explain their actions. And every single one is on the order of “The dog ate my homework.”, “Everybody does it.” and …“Becaaaaause.”
One of the things that makes Silicon Valley (and its few close cousins scattered hither tither) is that many people LOVE the intense hard work, work usually stunningly well compensated. They love team team team work made possible by deep individual work (a la Agile).
I have a number of friends who would like to work for Musk not for the compensation nor even the challenge, but for the “trophy” experience.
One close friend of a nephew is currently working on “secret stuff” at a small office location in Nevada. He adores it.
d fb
Seems the fate of every company, sooner or later, is for the entrepreneurial, risk-taking, innovative, founders, to be replaced by “professional management”.
Steve
Wow. Glad I never worked for someone like you. “Fire everyone, realize two weeks later it was a mistake, hire back ‘the best’, because that’s what makes me a genius”. NO, that’s what makes a poor, impulsive manager who does not mind ruining people’s lives.
The best will have moved on.
or, “that is a JC reminding the peons they are nothing without him, demonstrating what a big favor he does letting them work there at all”.
Steve
You didn’t answer my question, you went off on a tangent. Let me repeat the question:
When you invest in a company, is it for the welfare of the people working there? Is that your investment criterion?
Hating me is not the answer. 
The Captain
Well, Captain, your reply to my question above seems to be “as long as he makes me money I don’t care how he treats people”. When you invest in a company do you see the people working there as nothing other than a way to enrichen your portfolio? Because I don’t.
Lessee…I sold TSLA in July of last year, at $257. Now, it is trading at $176. Maybe it is the warm embrace of the cult that is so rewarding?
/sarcasm
Steve
You keep evading my question.
The Captain
I can answer it. One of your investing criteria for any company should be whether the management has an effective and appropriate strategy for managing their labor resources. That does not necessarily mean prioritizing their welfare, because the interests of labor and stockholders are not perfectly aligned. But it does mean that management should treat labor in a way that (at a minimum) can demonstrably lead to good outcomes for the company.
Arbitrarily and capriciously firing employees who have done nothing wrong, and are valuable enough to the company that you choose to re-hire them almost immediately, does not meet that standard. It’s a dumb choice. It’s not a choice veiled in mystery, like the ineffable qualities that define a musical genre like the blues - it’s just a bad decision.
That doesn’t necessarily mean Musk is a bad manager, BTW. One model of Elon is that he’s a guy that makes lots of non-traditional decisions - and that while the good non-traditional decisions are going to lead to awesome results, you have to also accept that there will be some bad non-traditional decisions that go with it. You get the bad with the good, but the good outweighs the bad. That doesn’t mean that when Musk slams his dongle in the car door that it’s a masterful gambit - it simply means that you’re not going to get inspired out-of-the-box thinking without a few car door dongle slams.
And who says you’ll be able to rehire them? Once you fired them they’re going to look for other jobs and if they’re as good as they are claimed to be, they should have no problem finding one quickly.
How do you measure those outcomes?
With great difficulty. Different businesses have different needs. A company that relies on cheaply-hired interchangeable lightly-trained or untrained labor for low-skilled jobs will have a vastly different appropriate policy than a company that relies on scarce highly-trained nonfungible (even unique) labor for highly-skilled jobs. And so metrics that mean good outcomes for one company (like keeping turnover low) won’t be at all useful for the other company (where turnover isn’t especially important).
But in no world is arbitrarily firing a bunch of people that you don’t actually want to fire, only to try to rehire them barely a few weeks later, a move that in itself will have good outcomes for the company. Even if you want to send a message that no one’s job is safe unless they perform, you still want that “unless they perform” to mean something.
The model of Elon Musk where this makes sense isn’t one where the decision itself is a good decision - it’s that having a CEO that makes extremely unconventional decisions is on the whole a benefit to the company. That the jackpot unconventional decisions deliver more value to the company than the stinkers. But that doesn’t mean the stinkers aren’t stinkers, and they shouldn’t be considered masterful gambits even if the CEO’s decisions on the whole are generally amazing.
Maybe that should say, “was” a great place to work.
As stated from this recent ex-employee:
Great companies are made up of equal parts great people and great products, and the latter are only possible when its people are thriving. The recent layoffs that are rocking the company and its morale have thrown this harmony out of balance and it’s hard to see the long-game. It was time for a change.
-RICH OTTO, FORMER HEAD OF PRODUCT LAUNCHES AT TESLA, ON LINKEDIN
I would have to assume that the head of product launches was not a wastrel.
My nephew after graduation from MIT was hired by a San Francisco firm with five other guys. The six were given a choice SF or Austin? The other five went to Austin to program near the sales team. My nephew went to SF to be in the computer room where the work was harder. All six were offered the same compensation.
At some point, my nephew led a small team. He hated it. He was now overseeing people instead of doing the work. In the computer world that matters if deadlines have to be met. He can do the work better himself. He shed the team.
Now the company does not look as if it will go public. He is shopping around. He is also settling down with a girlfriend. He is thinking of Google in NYC but would go anywhere in the Fortune 500. Last year was early in his job hunt. This year some of his friends have been laid off.
Arbitrary and capricious is bad, but do we really know that was the case or are we just guessing? The entire Tech sector has been doing mass layoffs for a year now, so perhaps there are other macroeconomic or even general psychological factors at work.
Last year was, by all accounts, a bloodbath for the tech industry, with more than 260,000 jobs vanishing — the worst 12 months for Silicon Valley since the dot-com crash of the early 2000s. Executives justified the mass layoffs by citing a pandemic hiring binge, high inflation and weak consumer demand. What's behind the tech industry's mass layoffs in 2024? : NPR
In any case, you make it sound like layoffs followed shortly by rehiring is unusual. That doesn’t seem to be the case.
Forty-nine percent of financial services companies in the survey plan to rehire at least some workers who were laid off for reasons unrelated to their performance. 47% of manufacturing companies and 42% of services companies plan to rehire some laid-off workers. Poll: 40% of employers plan to rehire some laid-off workers
I’m not saying Musk did the right thing. I’m just saying it is not unusual, particularly after financially disappointing quarters, which I believe Tesla recently had, or if there is a restructuring of the business plan, which Tesla may be doing.
Meta recently went through Tesla-scale layoffs as it redirected its business plan to prioritize AI. It started rehiring shortly after the layoffs.
The headcount swing is apparently heading back higher again, particularly for engineering and technical roles, Business Insider said. Any worker who was laid off since November is welcome to apply for the new openings, and dozens have already been rehired, the report said, citing three people familiar with the situation. https://www.thewrap.com/meta-rehiring-some-laid-off-staffers/
It is exceptionally unusual to layoff an entire team of 500 only to rehire many of them in less than a month. It is not as if financial conditions have suddenly improved in the last 16 days.