If You Say So
Elon Musk, financial Nostradamus, has 'bad feeling' about the economy
He also proposed cutting 10-percent of all Tesla jobs.
Less than a week after telling his employees that working from home is only for lazy people trying to scam their bosses with “pretend” jobs, Tesla CEO Elon Musk sent yet another email out to his executives, this time providing everyone his expert financial analysis on the health of global markets: Somehow, someway, he has a “super bad feeling” about it, okay?
In a message entitled “pause all hiring worldwide” sent yesterday and seen by Reuters, Musk explained to his higher-ups that he’s getting the sense all this geopolitical instability, 40-year-high inflation, slow pandemic recovery, and climate crises, bodes poorly for the economy at large. As such, he thinks it’s probably a good time to go ahead and cut roughly 10 percent of Tesla’s total workforce. As Reuters notes, this also presumably nixes the estimated 5,000 Tesla job postings recently open via LinkedIn. According to 2021 SEC filings, the luxury EV maker counted nearly total 100,000 employees. Tesla stock was down over 7 percent as of writing this.
Almost four years exactly — If the layoffs come to pass, they will be Tesla’s first major reduction in jobs since June 2018, when Musk announced a 9 percent shrink to offset the company’s then net-losses — although numbers indicate that Tesla ultimately recouped those jobs by the end of the year. Since then, the EV company’s employee count has skyrocketed, nearly doubling between mid-2020 and the present. While dramatic, the statistics make sense considering Tesla’s increased marketshare and prominence in the industry — despite its numerous, and I mean numerous, flaws.
About that hostile takeover — It’s unclear how, or even if, Musk’s economic Spidey Senses will influence his ongoing attempt to devour Twitter and turn it into... something somehow even worse than it already is. Musk has lost a lot of money since announcing his intention to “fix” the social media platform, and this latest announcement will most likely do nothing to stop that trend. It’s quite possible this could be the beginning of the end for his hostile takeover, but then again, who knows when it comes to Chaos Incarnate?
