Sustainability Infrastructure

Tesla lays off 200 Autopilot workers, closes California office 

This is the most recent in a number of job cuts taking place at the electric car company.
FILE – Elon Musk, Tesla CEO, attends the opening of the Tesla factory Berlin Brandenburg in Gruenheide, Germany, March 22, 2022. Musk, the world’s richest man and the owner of SpaceX and Tesla, says he is a free speech absolutist who doesn’t support the kind of content moderation that saw people like ex-President Donald Trump get banned for inciting violence. (Patrick Pleul/Pool via AP, File)

Story at a glance


  • Electric car and clean energy company Tesla laid off 200 employees Wednesday.  

  • The company also closed the San Mateo office where most of the employees worked.  

  • The layoffs come weeks after CEO Elon Musk told executives to pause hiring and to cut headcount by 10 percent.  

Tesla, business mogul Elon Musks’ electric car and clean energy company, laid off almost 200 employees from its Autopilot team after closing the San Mateo, California office where they all worked.  

The layoffs, which were first reported by Bloomberg, are the latest in a string of job cuts taking place in the company after Musk told Tesla executives the company needed to stop hiring and reduce headcount by 10 percent.  

At the end of last year, Tesla had almost 100,000 employees, according to Reuters, but it is unclear how many of those employees are salaried and how many are hourly workers. 


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Most of the Autopilot employees laid off Wednesday were hourly workers, which came as a surprise to many since last week Musk had outlined a plan to boost hourly jobs, Bloomberg reported.  

Employees at the San Mateo office were in charge of evaluating customer vehicle data on Autopilot driver-assistance features, according to Techcrunch. 

Tesla has been making cuts after Musk said the company’s new factories in Germany and Texas were “money furnaces” as the country continues to struggle with pandemic-related supply chain issues, according to Yahoo, and stating he believes the country is in a recession.  


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