Elon Musk fires Tesla's entire supercharger team | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk fires Tesla's entire supercharger team

ft.com

158 pointsstarwin115953 comments

Ongoing discussion [0] (71 points, 8 hours ago, 91 comments)

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40209382

Curiously, linked discussion has been downranked to Page 19 at time of posting.

This happens to almost every post that’s somewhat negative about Tesla. They mysteriously disappear from the front page within minutes even after getting a lot of engagement.

I’m pretty sure some nefarious flagging is happening and I hope dang takes a look at it.

Same on twitter. My timeline is full of this story yet it isn't in trending.

Amazing that you think Elon Musk wouldn't actively be censoring news unfavorable to his companies. Doubly so that you think he's capable of shame.

HN’s ranking algorithm penalizes potential flamebait stories as I understand it.

If you watch, you’ll see stories with more comments than points will quickly fall off the front page.

No, it's clearly a conspiracy to make Tesla look better on a niche forum. Enemy action is the only possibility.

No need to hope; just email him! hn@ycombinator.com.

I usually flag posts like these after a scan through the comments, as even though the article is tech related, the comments on this type of topic are usually uninsightful, 90% of the time just being typical political/social echo chamber warfare, an excuse for people to post low quality comments shitting on the persona non grata, in this case, Elon. These types of topics on HN usually accomplish nothing other than increasing the hate in the world. If the comments don't follow that pattern I don't flag. But they almost always do.

Why can’t you just flag the comments you don’t like instead of suppressing a relevant story?

Flagging is not for discussions unworthy of your standards. Check the guidelines.

More like every EV/Tesla/Musk story is brigaded by anti-EV and anti-Musk crowd that impossible to see anything civil.

a lot of terminally online people have a lot of money invested in tesla

I found this on page 1. I wonder if it is because:

  Elon Musk fires Tesla's entire supercharger team

is more clickbaity than:

  Tesla conducting more layoffs, including entire Supercharger team

Sounds like the flamewar detector algorithms reacted to it. Happens for a lot of Apple posts too. Y’all could email the mods to have them merge the dupes, and to review the post to make sure it isn’t being brigaded by Tesla fans or whatever. Contact link’s in the footer.

Users flagged this one—no doubt because these stories are so extremely repetitive.

The article starts with "Elon Musk has shut down the division that runs Tesla’s Supercharger business, dismissed two senior executives and fired hundreds more staff as the electric-car maker continues its restructuring amid a sharp downturn in the EV market."

I was thinking, "sharp downturn in the EV market?" So I looked up some stats and found "US EV sales reached 1,119,251 in 2023, up from 760,329 in 2022, 462,247 in 2021, 245,586 in 2020, and 230,761 in 2019."

There's no "sharp downturn". It's just people getting fed up with a fascist spokesperson, a product that has looked dated for years now, and better options available. I wish we still had decent journalists.

I think maybe it's more an overcapacity with more manufacturers getting models out there plus the early adopter market getting near saturated and the rate of growth dropping a lot and that its not fully crossed the chasm to mainstream yet.

So it's not that adoption as a whole is in trouble but more that any one ev maker is going to find it harder to make a lot of sales at the moment.

And it's definitely the case that a big chunk of tesla stock value was tied up with elons brand which is looking more like a problem than a benefit these days.

Got a source for him being a Fascist?

Perhaps Elon should step down? It seems his golden boy image is more than a little tarnished and he’s leaving bodies in his wake in sizable proportions.

Thankfully great entrepreneurs are only emboldened by sentiment like this.

“Any manager “who retains more than three people who don’t obviously pass the excellent, necessary and trustworthy test” should resign, he added.”

This is interesting. Get the assessment for being excellent and necessary is linked to strategy and business plans . How does one assess trustworthiness ? Interesting to understand what a trustworthy test would look like !

I wonder if this has something to do with his China visit. Like is he outsourcing this to someone else like BYD?

Wasn't this one of the things going well for tesla and positioning to actually not just be a car company?

When does SpaceX go to shit now and all that tax money subsidizing it go to waste?

A few years ago I fully expected Tesla to pull out of the vehicle game and focus on drivetrains, self-driving software, charging network and home/commercial battery banks.

Tons of companies already do those pieces, but no single company is able to put together a best selling car doing all of the above.

They might be ‘best selling’, but hardly ‘best’.

Make a better one!

Until then: it stays most valued car company.

Is this really true or just clickbait being bandied about?

folks on twitter seem to be reporting that they've been laid off. Seems legit.

https://x.com/willjameson/status/1785304036545315065?s=46&t=...

It's true.

Very legit question that everybody should ask themselves when reading anything Musk related in 2024.

In this case it seems true.

Was there something reported about Musk recently that wasn't true? Seems like the more extreme the story, the more likely it is to be true.

“Musk” and “layoffs” seem to go well together as far as trustworthiness is concerned.

I think we can say the same thing about anything now..

HEH. Never heard of "The Financial Times", eh?

It's not clickbait.

That’s that yellow newspaper right? Or was it beige!?

Pink, actually.

Many of the recently-fired team has been posting on Reddit about it.

https://archive.is/h5WgR

[dupe]

I wonder if someone on their team angered Elon, or if it’s just related to a new strategy.

Elon will properly rehire those he needs from the team via extra compensation as needed.

Tesla's charging standard is now the standard that everyone's going to use. There are other companies building out chargers. Demand for EV's in general seems to be dropping, so Tesla's EV's will be the biggest beneficiaries of new EV chargers built by everyone else.

Given all of that, Tesla no longer needs to be in the supercharger game.

> Tesla's charging standard is now the standard that everyone's going to use.

No, Tesla's charging standard is dead.

Everyone in North America is going to use CCS with Tesla's plug. The plug is now standardized as SAE J3400. It's CCS type 3.

Older Teslas will need a retrofit to be able to talk CCS.

Yep, maybe 10-15 will need to be rehired at double salary. It should be an incredibly formalized process in terms of building new superchargers. Maintaining old superchargers likely requires only 4-5 managers and 40-50 technicians globally, although they might be contractors. Building out a new supercharger is likely incredibly formalized, with permiting, design, architecture, and electrical work all done via thrid parties. No need to have 500 people around.

That may all be true, if you want to throw away the quality reputation that the superchargers built up and let the chargers and related travel experience sink as low as it is for the alternatives today.

I was seriously contemplating a Tesla when my current cars need to be replaced. The crazy stories I have been reading over the last few years really concern me. For an expensive purchase like a car, I want the most "boring" and reliable thing. The whole .. lets delete parts and add them back in .. seems crazy for a car (or rocket!!) company to do.

“New strategy” ..how long ago was this strategy hatched?

This would be foolish to rely on. If you throw an entire division in the trash, some of your critical employees won’t return at (almost) any price.

Remarkable thing here is that other vendors such as Rivian and Ford just joined up to the supercharging network, and now we have to wonder: if the majority (entirety?) of the supercharging team has been laid off, is this infrastructure that Rivian and Ford presumably paid to access going to start failing and (figuratively) rusting away?

It could be the opposite. Ford, Rivian and other third parties will be building to this standard. Tesla no longer needs to jump start the marketplace, so to speak.

Frankly, if Tesla continued in this way, it would soon raise antitrust issues. Would you want all your gasoline coming from the same company? Standard Oil was trust-busted a century ago for something similar.

Expect the Supercharger team to reconstitute itself with funding from several automakers and/or VC. It seems to me that the 'just works' feature that we love about Superchargers is going to get some level of competitiveness/innovation soon... like who thought it was a good idea to expose these chargers to rain (awnings seem like a big plus for a competitor to grab share).

> Would you want all your gasoline coming from the same company

Kinda do, because UX is just so superior.

But also we've learned this lesson with Apple/Google so well.

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