Tesla slashes its summer internship program
fortune.com
fortune.com
It's certainly not unheard of, but saying it's common is severely overstating it
But it's more common if you zoom out a bit and look at other industries that haven't been consistently booming. I went to university during an O&G downturn, and I had several friends who had accepted internship offers at oil companies which were cancelled at the last minute. There were even companies that suspended their co-op programs for students already working there. Students who had an 8 month internship arranged through the university were laid off in the middle of it and were left sitting on their hands since they weren't enrolled in any classes.
But I probably couldn't find any news articles about it, since those same companies were also going through mass layoffs at the time and nobody really cared about some interns having a rough time.
That has consequences for supervision of interns and would probably incur significant rescheduling and organizational overhead. So I see why something not considered "primary business, contributing to the bottom line" is simply cancelled.
Not great, though.
At one of my old employers, they laid off a guy a few days in who moved across the Atlantic for the job. Moved for the job and I doubt he even earned his airfare.
So...
He is simply stunned by the firing of the entire team. Everybody in the entire charging industry is just getting bounces when trying to email their contacts about the hundreds of contracted Supercharger installations in the works. Think about all the external contractors working on maintenance of existing stations, also no way to contact Tesla.
Here is an article claiming that Tesla may be looking to rehire some of the fired team. [1]
Firing the exec who won't listen to the CEO? Sure, that's business. Firing the entire team as some kind of punishment? That's cutting off your nose to spite your face.
[0] https://youtu.be/iVaViiX0xZY
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-may-rehire-some-laid-o...
Googling around, it looks like:
- 13% of Tesla is owned by Musk. He will vote I guess?
- The other big shareholders are funds. Do those vote?
- What percentage of private shareholders vote? I guess people who don't live in the US can't vote, even if they wanted?
Musk's time is over.
He's either spread too thin, got too money hungry (despite having nearly all of it!), lost his mind, or just hasn't got it anymore ...
https://electrek.co/2024/04/22/elon-musk-pigeon-ceo-former-t...
Hacker news: Elon is doing poorly and his time is over
I saw a Mustang Mach-E with the license plate "ELON WHO" or something like that.
A friend of mine saw our new Model 3 and said something snarky about supporting Musk. He is definitely not on this site.
Anti-Musk sentiment is huge on the socials. Even my wife, who is definitely definitely not on this site, thinks Musk is a huge shithead.
So yeah, Musk is doing poorly these days. It doesn't help his case when people look at his other antics like Twitter and legitimately wonder if he is getting distracted and should be replaced.
* Musk will vote, for obvious reasons.
* Big institutional funds almost always vote with the board of directors recommendations. They very rarely rock the boat for a lot of mostly good reasons.
* Private shareholders with a sizable stake likely will vote.
* Retail shareholders (i.e. you and I) are notorious for not voting. Case in point: AMC is mostly held by retail investors at this point and had to go through all sorts of shenanigans to be able to increase the maximum number of shares they could issue, because that typically requires a shareholder vote that simply wouldn't ever get enough total votes to pass.
It's arguable whether Vanguard should allow this, and whether it'd matter at the end. Vanguard is for retail investors who want to invest their money as cheaply as possible without thinking hard about it. Delivering proxy ballots, even electronically, does have a cost, and would likely make such funds slightly but noticeably more expensive. And to what benefit? After all, most retail investors don't care to vote. If you strongly care about your shareholder voice, the better solution is to buy shares in the company directly.
That said, Vanguard now lets you select from some broader voting methodologies (e.g. Vanguard's default, ESG, or "good corporate governance"). But nothing specific like "good corporate governance, except screw Musk over/always favor Musk".
In the individual stock case, Vanguard absolutely has to allow those share owners to vote their shares.
In the mutual fund case, Vanguard is the investor in the shares and Vanguard is the one who should cast the vote for those shares. End investors are invested in the mutual fund, and so could vote on mutual fund proxies, but IMO, should not be permitted to vote on the underlying shares that the mutual fund is invested in.
Those recommendations do generally follow Board recommendations on strategic topics, but frequently diverge from the board on matters of employee and executive pay (approving increases to share/option pools, etc.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_Shareholder_Se...
See https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001318605/0...
It's a vote amongst 'disinterested' shareholders or something like that.
See https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001318605/0...
A bit too much to qualify for a small-claims court in the US, I'm afraid?
Any reasonable court should throw this argument away in an instant. It's one thing to expect temporary accomodation for a 2 week internship, but for anything longer than that, moving and housing expenses should have to be covered by the employer if they renege on the contract in bad faith.
I wonder where they are at now?
I think of them as low-end cars that just happen to require pre-paying for 80% of their lifetime fuel cost because batteries are expensive and electricity is cheap, and by that metric they're not bad.
Not premium either, but not bad-bad.
I like this conception. I tell people the 3 is a gokart with an iPad and cup holders (ie. the value is in the drivetrain and handling, not the interior).
It seems short-sighted though, in my company the best employees we've had started as interns.
On the more rest of their offer, there is heavy concurrence, both from US actors and chinese.
Teslas don't sell as well as they used to in Europe either, in part due to Musk himself rather than any issue with the product (and of course chinese and european automaker competition).
Not sure how Tesla's labor conflict is going in Sweden, but last I heard it was not going in Tesla's favor.
I thought the consensus was that it only has a shitty reputation amongst non-owners.
I don't get the appeal myself but owners seem to love them pretty genuinely
Unfortunately for Tesla non-owners are the potential buyers.
It's definitely going in Tesla's favour. They've found work-arounds for most of the barriers the unions have thrown up and signed deals with various small non-union shops for a lot of what their union workers used to do. Now it's basically just a war of attrition where it comes down to if Tesla can live with the inconveniences longer than the union can keep their workers on strike, and by all accounts it looks like the union is blinking first. In fact several of the striking workers have apparently left the union and gone back to work, and the union just the other day allowed some of their striking workers to go back to work at Tesla without getting any concessions from Tesla.
It turns out that simply refusing to engage with the union at any level and on any points, and making it clear that you literally never will, is a surprisingly effective strategy.
Only because they don't play by the Swedish cooperation model. If they are smart they try to force a change of law and Tesla can go pound sand.
Their competitors all have between $100B and $250B worth of debt.
Elon himself negatively contributes to this with his words, promises, and actions. He doesn't do himself or his companies any favors there.
I also feel that Elon's handling of Twitter may be used as an idea of what he might do to Tesla with regards to ruthless layoffs and stiffing employees on severance etc. I recall that he also enforced a live-at-work requirement, effectively.
He models everyone after his image of himself. Maybe he should include the deliriums as well.
Tesla firing 10k factory workers and now the charging unit tells me they might be making a major retreat away from manufacturing.
Tesla (being forced in) opening their Supercharging network will resolve the second problem.
Tesla is, unfortunately, still the market leader for partial autonomous driving. But I see that changing within the next five years.
I've driven many EVs. With the way things are going, our next vehicles will not be Teslas.
You can only sell so many cars by selling to the top 20% of the market.
Are you comparing market capitalisation? That's a bad metric in this case.
You need to compare enterprise value. Market capitalisation changes when a company moves its financing around between issuing bonds vs issuing stocks, even though the 'real' size and importance of the company doesn't change at all.
Enterprise value adds up all the equity and all the outstanding bonds (but removes all the cash that's just lying around) to give you a number that's relatively independent of capital structure.
The established car manufacturers likely use more debt on their balance sheets.
Almost nobody ever irreplaceable.
What’s stopping them?
The IT market in those areas always booms whenever there's an economic downturn in the west as executives lay people off in the expensive locations and move their jobs to cheaper locations abroad to save costs.
On paper this short term move makes them look like Rockstars to shareholders since they reduced operational costs with the stroke of a pen without decreasing profits.
What happens long term is not their problem since they won't be around if the shit hits the fan, but that's not always the case. A friend of mine leads a team of devs in Vietnam and he's super happy with their output so assuming all offshore work is automatically poor quality is in bad faith.
Quality of education and certifications. At the moment, even if you got someone with a b.sc degree, it's a lottery game if they will be usable for more than following a callcenter script - I've worked with offshorers who were absolutely top-notch, and others where I disconnected from a telco and wondered "WTF did I just witness".
The problem is: this can rapidly change, when the Indian government gets its shit together, and actually fights against corruption in education. Add 4-5 years for the changes to become effective, and suddenly the US/EU will be at a serious disadvantage in numbers.
Do you realize this example is actually hurting your argument a lot?
You can't win the rat race to lower wages.
The race to big wage can be honestly won with only one method: the company should extract more value from your work than it costs them to pay you, and more than it would extract from a cheaper replacement. If it is so, firing you hurts the company more than paying you a lot, and no sensible business will ever get rid of such an employee.
Nope, quite the opposite actually: with strong unions a big company cannot move work piecemeal (as the Union would strike back to block that in a way that makes small moves unprofitable for the company) and moving the whole company at once is impractical so they are stuck. Without unions, the company can work at their own pace till the last employee. In a class war, like in all war, you either unite or perish divided.
> The race to big wage can be honestly won with only one method
That's a convoluted way to day it cannot be won.
But the reality is that it can in fact be won, of collective action of citizens put enough pressure (through laws) on companies to prevent them from seeking profit at the expense of the society they live in. That's how it always work, and when there's no organized political action against big corps, the people are always losing.
Unions and state intervention are how the US people (and Europeans too) reached prosperity after WWII, and there's no way around that. Laissez faire only make a handful of winners at the expense of everybody else.
I prefer to view it as mutually beneficial cooperation. If my value to the employer is not as high as I think it should be, it is either a reason to readjust my expectations, improve my productivity or change the employer.
The employers everywhere, everyday, have shown that it's exactly how they behave. In fact, my reaction is only the reciprocal reaction to theirs.
“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Warren Buffet
> I prefer to view it as mutually beneficial cooperation.
I can't stop you from believing in Santa Claus for sure, but for sure I'll still hope you grow up one day.
> If my value to the employer is not as high as I think it should be, it is either a reason to readjust my expectations, improve my productivity
You have been well formatted by propaganda, they can be proud of them indeed.
I don't think you are here for a productive discourse. It is more likely you are waging a class war here. Please, find another person to preach Marxism to, I come from a country that has suffered greatly from Marxist ideology and the damage was so severe that recovery is still not in sight.
Hey, you're the one who started preaching ideology in that thread, you cannot complain if I do the same afterwards ;).
> Please, find another person to preach Marxism to,
When you grow up, you'll learn that the world is not black and white, and if you look past the cold war propaganda, there's actually nuance between the two evils that are actual Communism and Liberalism. The only system that actually delivered prosperity anywhere in the world is the Welfare state, and it has nothing to do with Marxism except that it recognizes that unconstrained Capitalism lead to bad outcome (and, in practice, Fascism, more often than not).
> I come from a country that has suffered greatly from Marxist ideology and the damage was so severe that recovery is still not in sight.
What country is it? The damage from Communism were indeed sever when it lasted, but in most former communists countries, one must not confuse what we're seeing now with the aftermath of Communism, when it's in fact the natural consequences of the new Capitalist order that emerged after its demise.
If you care about preventing corporations from moving jobs abroad, voting for more capital control is a good addition to unionizing.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19361712
[1] https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2008/12/tesla-death-watch-...