Tesla fired hundred of employers after bad results

Tesla fired hundreds of employees following what the company said is an annual performance review process, the company told TechCrunch. The news was first reported by The Mercury News.

“Like all companies, Tesla conducts an annual performance review during which a manager and employee discuss the results that were achieved, as well as how those results were achieved, during the performance period,” a Tesla spokesperson said. “This includes both constructive feedback and recognition of top performers with additional compensation and equity awards, as well as promotions in many cases. As with any company, especially one of over 33,000 employees, performance reviews also occasionally result in employee departures. Tesla is continuing to grow and hire new employees around the world.”

Workers the paper spoke to estimated some 400 – 700 workers have been fired, however, the company expects that overall attrition will be similar to last year, and that this won't impact Model 3 production.

A former employee told Reuters "about 400 people" were among those who left the company, and that the positions ranged from "associates to team leaders to supervisors. We don't know how high up it went," the person said. Tesla declined to confirm how many people were fired.

Tesla will be reporting its earnings in the next few weeks along with a whole suite of other companies. But on the year, Tesla’s stock has continued to see an incredible run, especially following up on its most recent quarterly earnings report. The company said there was a further increase in Model S orders following the Model 3 handover event, prompting an additional amount of enthusiasm for the company.

During that report, Tesla also said it saw 1,800 Model 3 reservations per day following the handover event. But since then there’s been quite a bit of news, including a voluntary recall yesterday of 11,000 Model X vehicles. Earlier this month Tesla said it produced 260 Model 3 vehicles in Q3. CEO Elon Musk has said before that the company is entering “production hell,” a phrase that has been thrown around quite since then.

CEO Elon Musk blamed the shortfall on what he called "production bottlenecks," which prompted speculation that the assembly line at Tesla's Fremont factory was not yet ready to generate the kind of output needed to fill the roughly 455,000 Model 3 orders it has on its books. The Wall Street Journal said in a report last week that employees were making some Model 3 parts by hand.