Tesla is now facing its worst crisis in years. Last week, CEO Elon Musk laid off the automaker’s roughly 500-person Supercharger team and what remained of its policy and new vehicle teams. Before that, it reported its first-quarter financial results — and they were even worse than the lackluster performance that investors were expecting.
Already this year, Tesla has cut around 10% of its employees. Now Musk is promising that it will shift toward becoming an “AI” company.
Does Tesla, long a stalwart of America’s EV transition, now pose a danger to it? On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse discuss the automaker’s turn away from EVs, and why Musk’s decision to lay off the Supercharger team could throw the entire country’s EV transition off track. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Mentioned:
Previously on Shift Key: The U.S. Has a Tesla Problem
Tesla’s Identity Crisis Gets Hardcore
Tesla’s Q1 2024 investor report
BloombergNEF on Superchargers’ profit potential
Rob on how to make sense of Elon Musk’s wacky moves
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This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by…
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
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