Another week, another round of layoffs at Tesla to report, and this time engineers are caught up in the mix. 

It's not immediately clear how many people have been laid off at Tesla in this latest purge, which appears to have begun Sunday night. Nonetheless, a look at LinkedIn for posts about Tesla layoffs returns an extensive list of engineers, developers, incoming interns and others whose roles had been cut. 

We've asked Tesla to comment. 

As this isn't the first round of layoffs for the company of late - we're going on nearly a month with almost weekly reports of job cuts at Tesla - some idea of where these cuts are coming from can be gleaned from previous Tesla layoff news.

At the end of last month after Tesla boss Elon Musk fired a pair of senior executives, and the entire Supercharger team with them, Musk said he intended to be "absolutely hard core" about this wave of Tesla layoffs. 

Tesla leadership was reportedly instructed to terminate any staff who didn't pass muster, and it's entirely possible this week's cuts are the first wave of such terminations.

Musk has given little justification for the layoffs other than to say that Tesla has to restructure "about every five years" in order to "reorganize and streamline the company for the next phase of growth." 

The layoff circus at Tesla began in the middle of April when an internal email from Elon Musk to employees leaked, revealing plans for the company to eliminate more than 10 percent of its global workforce. Amounting to around 14,000 jobs, those layoffs have continued ever since. 

Elimination of jobs at Tesla follows a dismal start to the year for electric car maker, with losses, slipping sales and decreased production reported in the first quarter. Tesla nonetheless has seen its stock buoyed by promises from Musk on items like robotaxis and distributed computing networks made up of his idle cars. 

Of course, there's always the possibility Musk is just firing people with little regard for anything but reducing costs, with Bloomberg reporting that Tesla is already wondering if it shouldn't rehire some of the Supercharger team it laid off. The elimination of the entire Supercharger workforce after widespread adoption of Tesla's charging standard had other automakers worried for the future of Tesla's charging network, and the move had many wondering why Tesla made that decision. 

There's precedent for the possibility that it was a Musk-related overcut: When Twitter was gutted following Musk's 2022 acquisition of the company, Twitter reportedly realized its mistake and asked several dozen employees to return after they were laid off by accident. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/05/07/tesla_layoffs_continue/