Just days after promising he’d make Tesla profitable within months, CEO Elon Musk announced today that 9 percent of the company’s workforce is being laid off as part of the effort to make it so.
Musk tweeted out his memo to employees, laying out the reasons for the layoffs.
He said the “difficult but necessary” decision was the result of a comprehensive organizational restructuring, targeting duplication as well as some job functions that, “while they made sense in the past, are difficult to justify today.”
“Given that Tesla has never made an annual profit in the almost 15 years since we have existed, profit is obviously not what motivates us,” he wrote. “What drives us is our mission to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable, clean energy, but we will never achieve that mission unless we eventually demonstrate that we can be sustainably profitable. That is a valid and fair criticism of Tesla’s history to date.”
