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Tesla Inc. has eliminated its entire Supercharger team, which is responsible for building an electric-vehicle charging network in the U.S. that major carmakers plan to use, according to media reports and social media posts from employees.
The Austin-based company laid off about 500 people, according to The New York Times, citing an email sent to employees by CEO Elon Musk. Musk said in the email that he would dissolve the "entire group" and the company would finish charging stations under construction and build some new ones "where critical."
It's unclear how many of those positions were based in the Austin area and if they were counted in the company's mass layoff reported earlier in April that impacted nearly 2,700 employees at its electric vehicle factory in eastern Travis County, or about 12% of its workforce there. The cuts — which marked the largest mass layoff in Austin's modern history — were part of CEO Elon Musk's plan to dismiss more than 10% of its global workforce of over 140,000.
Musk addressed the recent layoffs on X, formerly known as Twitter, in an April 30 post.
"Tesla still plans to grow the Supercharger network, just at a slower pace for new locations and more focus on 100% uptime and expansion of existing locations," Musk said.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the cuts to the Supercharger team halted construction at a dozen Supercharger sites in Texas. And in New York, property owners in negotiations with the company to add more chargers to their sites were left hanging.
Rebecca Tinucci, Tesla’s senior director of EV charging, is also reportedly leaving the company, alongside the 500-person team she oversaw, according to The Information. Tinucci oversaw the effort to win support from other automakers for Tesla’s North American Charging Standard, or NACS, landing her a spot on the TIME 100 Climate list. In 2023, auto giants Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Co. said they would adopt Tesla's NACS set up for all future EVs.
The abrupt dismissal of the team leaves much uncertainty about the future of what has become a major U.S. charging network, and it caught many employees off guard.
Lane Chaplin, a senior manager in Tesla’s charging division in Austin, wrote on LinkedIn: “In the middle of the night, I learned, along with all my #Tesla Global #Charging colleagues, the Tesla Charging org is no more.”
Swapnesh Walunj, who previously handled charging analytics in Austin, also posted on LinkedIn that the entire charging organization had been let go. He said he worked at Tesla for three years, working in both the commercial and home charging spheres.
Will Jameson, who worked for Tesla's charging infrastructure team in the Bay Area, according to his social media bio, was also impact by the cuts.
"What this means for the charging network, NACS, and all the exciting work we were doing across the industry, I don't yet know. What a wild ride it has been," he said in a post on X.
The layoffs come amid softening sales of electric vehicles overall and after Tesla (Nasdaq: TSLA) reported disappointing first-quarter deliveries earlier in April that declined on a year-over-year basis for the first time in almost four years.
Bloomberg reported May 1 that Tesla is also abandoning summer internship programs just weeks before they were to start.
Austin employees
| Rank | Prior Rank | Company name (Prior rank) |
|---|---|---|
1 | 1 | Tesla Inc. |
2 | 2 | Dell Technologies Inc. |
3 | 3 | Amazon |
