Elon Musk Cutting 10% Of Tesla Staff Because Of ‘Bad Feeling’

Elon Musk is going to be letting go of 10% of Tesla’s salaried employees, after first telling executives in an email last week that he has a “super bad feeling” about the state of the economy.

Although he recently made rather flippant remarks about a potential recession, Musk clearly doesn’t want Tesla to be one of the bankruptcies that he says will “need to happen” because “it’s been raining on fools for too long.”

Tesla’s stock price has fallen a total of 22% since he used some of his shares as part of his acquisition of Twitter, which is currently in limbo. It has still staved off other usual signs of a more permanent downturn, like increasing dealer inventories for their product, so far.

In the email sent to the actual recipients of the layoffs, Musk said that the cuts were coming because Tesla is “overstaffed in many areas.” He did, however, mention that “hourly headcount will increase,” and also said the layoffs will not affect “anyone actually building cars, battery packs, or installing solar.”

Musk had also sent a missive days ago saying that Tesla workers who want to do remote work “must be in the office for a minimum (and I mean minimum) of 40 hours per week or depart Tesla.” Some now suspect that this message was an attempt to convince some staff members to quit before cutting more numbers with layoffs. He also said that remote employees were “phoning it in.”