Elon Musk fires Tesla's entire supercharger team

financialpost.com:

Elon Musk has shut down the division that runs Tesla Inc.‘s Supercharger business, dismissed two senior executives and fired hundreds more staff as the electric-car maker continues its restructuring amid a sharp downturn in the EV market.

Musk announced internally on Monday that the head of the superchargers group, Rebecca Tinucci, and Daniel Ho, head of new products, would be leaving along with their entire teams. About 500 people were in the supercharger group, the memo said.

Tesla’s supercharger system is among the largest charging networks in the world, and was one the reasons the company enjoyed such a commanding lead over rival carmakers for so long. While the supercharger operations will continue, the move raises questions over the future of the charging business.

The entire public policy unit will also be disbanded following the departure of its leader, Rohan Patel, in the middle of April.

“Hopefully these actions are making it clear that we need to be absolutely hard core about headcount and cost reduction,” Musk wrote in the memo, which was first reported by The Information. “While some exec staff are taking this seriously, most are not yet doing so.”

Any manager “who retains more than three people who don’t obviously pass the excellent, necessary and trustworthy test” should resign, he added.

Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.

The latest dismissals at the company come after Musk announced last month that the carmaker would cut “more than 10 per cent” of its total workforce, more than 14,000 jobs, in order to be “lean, innovative and hungry.”

The urgency of the shift was underlined by Tesla reporting a decline of almost 10 per cent in revenues in the first quarter of this year, its first