Tesla Just Closed Up Shop In California!

Electric car giant Tesla has cut over 200 employees from its San Mateo, California office which will eventually see the location close altogether.

The cuts and closure of the office comes as a result of the company’s chief excutive, Elon Musk, expressing concerns about job cuts due to the worsening economy that he has a “super bad feeling” about.

At least 195 of the 276 total employees were notified that their position had been eliminated while the remaining were told they would be relocated to another site.

The San Mateo office were connected to the Tesla Autopilot driver-assistance system.

Here’s what Reuters learned from Carnegie Mellon University engineering professor Raj Rajkumar:

“Tesla clearly is in a major cost-cutting mode,” adding that “raw material costs and supply chain problems” are troubling the company.

In fact, not long ago did Musk state that Tesla factories have become “gigantic money furnaces” as a result of the supply chain issues during a recent interview.

“Just been trying to keep the factories operating the last couple years has been a very difficult thing, like supply chain interruptions have been severe, like extremely severe. The past two years have been an absolute nightmare of supply chain disruptions, one thing after another, and we are not out of it yet.”

Daily Wire dropped some details:

In another bout of layoffs, two employees who volunteered in LGBTQ and diversity roles lost their jobs. Both had received multiple promotions in their relatively short tenures, seemingly indicating that their performance was not a cause for concern and that the layoffs could be related to Musk’s campaign against the “woke mind virus.”

Last week, former Tesla employees sued the automaker for allegedly violating federal law through its execution of widespread dismissals. According to the class action complaint from John Lynch and Daxton Hartsfield — who worked at Tesla’s Gigafactory 2 plant in Sparks, Nevada — the company violated the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act by failing to provide 60 days of advance written notice regarding the mass layoff.

“Plaintiffs and all similarly situated employees have been damaged by Tesla’s conduct constituting violations of the WARN Act,” the lawsuit argues, “and are entitled to damages for their back pay and associated benefits for each day of the violation because Tesla has not acted in good faith nor with reasonable grounds to believe their acts and omissions were not a violation of the WARN Act.”

Just last year Musk shared that Tesla would be relocating its headquarters from California to Austin, Texas.

Here’s what Musk said at the launch of the new facility:

“It’s tough for people to afford houses, and people have to come in from far away. There’s a limit to how big you can scale in the Bay Area. In Austin, our factory is like five minutes from the airport, 15 minutes from Downtown.”

Many major companies have been moving their business out of California. And the closure of the San Mateo facility only shows Tesla’s broader transition out of this Democrat-run state.

Sources: DailyWire, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters

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