Entire Supercharging Team Fired?

News yesterday is that the entire 500+ person word-wide SC team has been let go. That is alarming. Why would Elon sack the execs and all the employees of this important part of Tesla's business? Could Tesla be selling the SC network off to a third party? Opinions? Other theories?

 

[Ostrichsak]

What facts can be obtained without a PR department or people directly involved chiming in? Besides Elons tweets.

Thanks for making my case.

This is naive and unrealistic when the individual at hand has a material impact on financial choices I've made.

"Just don't pay attention and pretend it isn't happening" isn't a serious solution to a serious problem.

Sounds like you made poor financial decisions.

 

[gearchruncher]

In other words, the echo chamber you've created for yourself won't allow you to escape the negativity (largely artificially engineered) of him and his character which inundates you with constant reaffirmation that Elon Musk is, in fact, Satan himself. Yeah, that would get a bit annoying.

You're talking about a man who literally tweets things that can be read directly with no "news" involved, and bought twitter so that we could hear his thoughts without the filter of "the news".

Tweets such as how McKenzie Scott is the downfall of western civilization because she donates money, how COVID is not real and vaccines injure people, how he's up for a cage match with Zuckerberg, how "woke" is the reason for everything bad, blatant misinformation about immigration and election fraud, and let's not forget the transparent anti-Semitism. Or even just the fact that having children is "free" and everyone should have more. None of these require interpretation or reporting. They are all just literal tweets of his own words that you can read.

Here, let's start, tell me how the media artificially engineered this to make Elon look bad:

(If you have to be told, no non-citizen can vote in a federal election, and you can't be "illegal" and "a citizen" at the same time. It's in the constitution. And a reminder that Musk is an immigrant, and had to take a test on US Civics as part of his naturalization process)

 

[terranx]

Sounds like you made poor financial decisions.

Anyone who invested in Tesla within the last few years has in fact made poor financial decisions.

 

[ucmndd]

Sounds like you made poor financial decisions.

Judging from your signature close to but not quite as many as you, yes.

 

[SO16]

This is naive and unrealistic when the individual at hand has a material impact on financial choices I've made.

"Just don't pay attention and pretend it isn't happening" isn't a serious solution to a serious problem.

No it isn’t naive.

People can buy the product. Use the product. And not have any idea what the CEO is doing. That is true for any and every product available.

Now IF you WANT to know all that is going on with said product, then yes. But most don’t give a .

 

[Ostrichsak]

You're talking about a man who literally tweets things that can be read directly with no "news" involved, and bought twitter so that we could hear his thoughts without the filter of "the news".

Tweets such as how McKenzie Scott is the downfall of western civilization because she donates money, how COVID is not real and vaccines injure people, how he's up for a cage match with Zuckerberg, how "woke" is the reason for everything bad, blatant misinformation about immigration and election fraud, and let's not forget the transparent anti-Semitism. Or even just the fact that having children is "free" and everyone should have more. None of these require interpretation or reporting. They are all just literal tweets of his own words that you can read.

Here, let's start, tell me how the media artificially engineered this to make Elon look bad:
View attachment 1043437
(If you have to be told, no non-citizen can vote in a federal election, and you can't be "illegal" and "a citizen" at the same time. It's in the constitution.)

A great example of a post I'm not even going to read per the statements I just made regarding avoiding any posts from either side of an echo chamber not being of any value.

Anyone who invested in Tesla within the last few years has in fact made poor financial decisions.

People act like it's the only way to make money. It's not investment, it's speculation. Speculation comes with a LOT more risks. Don't come crying to the world if you want to put sums of money that matter into speculation positions.

Judging from your signature close to but not quite as many as you, yes.

The difference is that I don't consider my car purchases investments. A lot of people who don't understand finances make this same mistake. If you truly cared about them as an investment you'd never buy a new one of any make. Ever.

I purchase cars in a way that insulates me from guaranteed depreciation as much as possible (hence why all of them but 1 was bought used and sold for a profit) but I certainly don't treat them as investments. I also don't care what the senior leadership of the companies that made them has to say on any topic any more than what they care of how much I make reselling one of their cars on the secondary market.

 

[DuncanM]

I bought my 2022 M3 when and because the CCS1 adapter became available as I didn't want to rely solely on the Tesla SC network. I actually think that other EV manufacturers adopting the NACS standard was a mistake as it deprived the existing CCS1 charging networks of future capital investment and future revenue. So here we are with Elon taking a knife to the SC team and destroying long term confidence in a transition to EVs and probably causing the entire non-Tesla EV public fast charging network to implode.

 

[terranx]

The difference is that I don't consider my car purchases investments. A lot of people who don't understand finances make this same mistake. If you truly cared about them as an investment you'd never buy a new one. Ever. I purchase cars in a way that insulates me from guaranteed depreciation as much as possible (hence why all of them but 1 was bought used and sold for a profit) but I certainly don't treat them as investments nor do I care what the senior leadership of them has to say any more than what they care of how much I make reselling one of their cars on the secondary market.

Something doesn't have to be an investment to be considered a poor financial decision. Seems like you have some trouble with understanding your own words. Not too surprising given how many words you're using to convey nothing of substance.

 

[HitchHiker71]

This seems pretty straightforward to me:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1785406795814510785

https://twitter.com/x/status/1785461086688256361

Context is king when it comes to understanding sea changes of this nature. Without context it is really difficult to understand the intent and the path forward. Unfortunately, without context, people generally tend to assume the worst - that's why providing context is important - it helps us to all understand the why and the path forward. I realize Tesla is infamous for not giving context though, so it's a hard row when things like this happen.

My primary concern is that, even with lower sales volumes, the SC network still has to grow enough to keep up with public charging demand. I know more and more people are experiencing SC network saturation at times, especially in heavy urban areas, and when we take into account the two biggest detractors for BEV sales - range anxiety and public charging station availability - an announcement like this can too easily be misinterpreted as bad news especially in the MSM. So my biggest concern here is that this move may actually cannibalize future Tesla sales volume on some level - especially for traditional consumers as opposed to early adopters.

That said, and after sleeping on this topic, we also know that Tesla recently announced the availability of the prefabricated SC packages that are provisioned in as little as four days (https://electrek.co/2024/04/08/tesla-deploy-pre-fabricated-superchargers-game-changing-4-days/). So perhaps this is one of those scenarios where the SC dev team literally worked themselves out of a job by automating a lot of what they did manually in times past via prefabricated SC packages. If Tesla can now manufacture pre-fabricated SC stations and ship them to a third parties for installation - well - they likely don't need many people to maintain this delivery model moving forward - especially if Musk has made the decision to move into more of a maintenance mode while pausing further development efforts for the SC networks at least for now. Pure speculation on my part of course, but I'm trying to piece apart what we watched happen yesterday and try to understand the path forward.

 

[Cyber-Rhino]

Yesterday morning I drove by a complete but unopened supercharging station in El Monte, CA to see one charger had been ripped out. Looks like maybe a truck pulled it? A disgruntled recently fired Tesla employee, perhaps? haha Weird coincidence. Anyone else know of any vandalized superchargers?

 

[ucmndd]

No it isn’t naive.

People can buy the product. Use the product. And not have any idea what the CEO is doing. That is true for any and every product available.

Now IF you WANT to know all that is going on with said product, then yes. But most don’t give a .

Once again, "be ignorant and pretend something isn't happening that has a material impact on you and choices you have made" is not a serious response, just a dismissive sideshow to the actual problem being discussed.

 

[texas_star_TM3]

So u don't want the safest car in history bc of some stuff the CEO is doing?
That's some protest right there
I hope you follow the CEO of every other brand you are considering as closely as you are Elon

what good is the "safest car in history" should the charging network deteriorate and the Service Centers take *weeks* for simple repairs because the CEO is a manchild who fires entire teams in rage and much rather tweet multiple times per day on political issues not even remotely tied to the company he is running?

 

[Ostrichsak]

Something doesn't have to be an investment to be considered a poor financial decision. Seems like you have some trouble with understanding your own words. Not too surprising given how many words you're using to convey nothing of substance.

So you took what I said as somehow against you personally even though we were in agreement and felt like lashing out at me personally as the only means of restoring dignity from whatever perceived afront you felt. Par for the course 'round here.

 

[gearchruncher]

This seems pretty straightforward to me:

Ok, here's a Tweet from Elon a month ago:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1772444422971494838

Yet I have two Teslas, and 5 weeks later neither ever got a free trial, nor did over 30% of all Teslas. So I'm supposed to trust Musk that the SC network will keep getting expanded, despite having no resources in Tesla to do it? Elon can post whatever he wants on Twitter, it rarely comes true.

 

[terranx]

So you took what I said as somehow against you personally even though we were in agreement and felt like lashing out at me personally as the only means of restoring dignity from whatever perceived afront you felt. Par for the course 'round here.

I don't take anything on this site personally. I just think you're spouting nonsense and trying to make yourself sound smarter than you are.

 

[texas_star_TM3]

It truly is astounding how many people are willing to cut off their nose to spite their face. Oh well. It gives me something to laugh at.

people see what they want to see with this.

yeah. because the "safest car" is helpful for charging or getting a weeks long repair done without a loaner ...

 

[texas_star_TM3]

At least from some of the X posts this morning - there are claims that the SC group that was cut was dev/planning/implementation only - there's a separate maintenance team that did not report up to Rebecca Tinucci. Not sure if this is accurate - since again - Tesla has no PR dept to validate assumptions or to tell anyone anything constructively outside of various tweets from the TechnoKing.

which goes against Elon's claim that they will focus on expanding existing locations. Because that requires development, planning, implementation and lots of coordination with local folks/ state/ city permitting...

 

[gearchruncher]

A great example of a post I'm not even going to read per the statements I just made regarding avoiding any posts from either side of an echo chamber not being of any value.

"Elon gets misquoted in the news that's why you don't like him" -> posts Elon quotes direct from twitter -> "I'm not going to read those, that's an echo chamber of hate"

Niiiiiiceee.

 

[KelvinMace]

From a Time story last year:

Tesla’s creation of a vast new EV charging business was, apparently, an accident. The debate over how to build charging infrastructure has raged since the early days of electric vehicles. Will people just charge up at home? How much are consumers willing to pay to recharge? Should governments build and operate a charging network? Amid this debate, Tesla went ahead and built its own network, not to turn charging into a profit center but rather to reassure buyers that they could get across the country without running out of power.

Just 12 years ago, there was a single Tesla Supercharger location in the US. Today, there are 2,257 Supercharger locations and there are 9,717 total fast charging locations in the US.

Tesla aims for ~10% profitability from Superchargers. A year and a half ago, they gave away their proprietary connector which has since become the industry-standard. This encourages competition from other charging networks.

EV charging competition will force down profitability - possibly to the level of gas stations, which don't exist to make money off of gas, but rather off of food and beverages while people are refueling.

The mission to make EV charging universally available was an Old Elon goal. We have new Elon now, a guy who moved is HQ to a state where it is illegal to sell his cars. He also courts the support of politicians who would trash the entire green energy/EV movement given half a chance. Tesla had a HUGE head start and branding advantage (an advantage Musk sullies every day on Twitter) over the competition. McDonalds has tons of competitors, but still manages quite nicely since it had a first mover advantage. Tesla Superchargers were synonymous with the words "reliability" and "ubiquity". It would have been a LONG time before any competitor would come close to infringing on that advantage.

 

[HitchHiker71]

"Elon gets misquoted in the news that's why you don't like him" -> posts Elon quotes direct from twitter -> "I'm not going to read those, that's an echo chamber of hate"

Niiiiiiceee.

Gotta love the circular logic in play there...