Elon Musk has confirmed that Tesla would cut 10% of its salaried staff in the next three months.
He told a business conference in the Middle East that the cut would be around 3.5% of the company’s 100,000 staff globally.
The issue of staff cuts emerged at the start of this month when he mused in a series of emails to staff that he was worried about the outlook for the economy and the company and as a result Tesla would cut 10% of its staff.
That was later clarified to 10% of salaried staff and that there would be no cuts in the number of blue-collar staff involved in the actual production of cars in the US, China and Germany.
In the early June emails, Musk told managers to “pause all hiring worldwide.”
The dire outlook came two days after the billionaire told staff to return to the workplace or leave.
Earlier this week it was revealed that Former Tesla employees had filed a lawsuit against Musk’s electric car company alleging its decision to carry out a “mass layoff” violated federal law as the company did not provide advance notice of the job cuts.
Reuters reported thar the lawsuit was filed late Sunday in Texas by two workers who said they were terminated from Tesla’s gigafactory plant in Sparks, Nevada, in June.
According to the suit, more than 500 employees were terminated at the Nevada factory.
The legal action claims Tesla failed to follow US federal laws on mass layoffs that require a 60-day notification period under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.
They are seeking class action status for all former Tesla employees throughout the United States who were laid off in May or June without advance notice.
“Tesla has simply notified the employees that their terminations would be effective immediately,” the complaint said.
Musk played down the lawsuit as “trivial” at the Middle East business conference he spoke at on Monday.
“Let’s not read too much into a pre-emptive lawsuit that has no standing,” he said at the Qatar Economic Forum organised by Bloomberg.
“It seems like anything related to Tesla gets a lot of clicks, whether it is trivial or significant. I would put that lawsuit you’re referring to in the trivial category.”
Musk told the same forum that he “never said that people should invest in crypto[currency]” as retail investors feel the pain the plummeting digital coins market which is now being called The Crypto Winter.
Despite buying and touting Dogecoin, Musk told the Qatar Economic Forum on Tuesday that he made a distinction between publicly supporting the digital coin and urging others to invest.
In the case of Tesla, SpaceX, myself, we all did buy some bitcoin, but it’s a small percentage of our total cash assets,” Musk told Bloomberg (Bloomberg organised the forum).
Musk added that he also bought Dogecoin, which can also be used to buy Tesla merchandise.
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Separately in the US, the board of Twitter voted to approve Musk’s $US54.20 a share offer.
