Elon Musk is rehiring some of the Tesla Supercharger staff he fired in April, according to a report by Bloomberg.
He did more or less the same in 2022 when the Twitter takeover was starting.
His hiring and firing practices have been criticized and even led to his being sued.
Elon Musk appears to be overenthusiastic in pressing the trigger when it comes to firing his employees.
More than 500 staff members had been temporarily laid off from Supercharger services back in April as part of a cost-saving measure introduced by Musk at a time when Tesla was said to be in financial distress.
Sounds familiar? That’s because he’s been there before.
Six months after becoming Twitter’s controlling shareholder in 2022 and rapidly reducing head count by about 90%, Musk told users today he was going to try to rehire some of the people who got laid off. He said he regretted his decision somewhat
“Well, desperate times call for desperate measures,” Musk told CNBC’s David Faber in May 2023. “So there’s no question that some of the people who were let go probably shouldn’t have been let go.”
Fire-and-rehire is one trick that many have said was deliberate on the part of Musk.
Walter Isaacson, who wrote a biography of Musk, recently told Lex Fridman that the mass layoffs at Twitter were part of Musk’s “delete-delete-delete” management style with regard to his companies. He said that the CEO is supposed to delete, delete, delete and then add back like 20% of what you’ve deleted, because you didn’t delete enough in round one because you were too timid.
Since founding his first company late in the 90s, he has grown to become the most significant entrepreneur and hardest worker of this century. Musk owns other companies besides Tesla and X; he also runs SpaceX, Neuralink, an AI startup called xAI, and a tunnel company. All these business ventures have made him one of the richest men in the world.
Yet his critics counter that is no proof Musk is remarkable at running those companies.
“Poorly run organizations can still be financially viable,” explained Business Insider to Alec Levenson, senior research scientist at the University of Southern California Marshall Center for Effective Organizations.
“If the margins are good enough, if the customer loyalty is strong enough, you can still have good financial results,” added Levenson. “But I guarantee you the results would be that much better if the management practice is improved, and you can do it without hurting the bottom line.”
Former hiring and firing practices on his companies’ behalf have been decried from the outside and even at times claimed to be illegal.
Business Insider also obtained an email revealing that Musk had informed his Tesla staff that he is the person who will approve any new hiring.
Human resources experts said, besides wasting the CEO’s time, the move signals that there is lack of trust in employees responsible for hiring personnel.
“Having ‘one of the most successful entrepreneurs’ and ‘running two very important organizations get down into the weeds like that is the worst use of his time,'” Levenson said. “‘What that says is that you don’t trust anybody that’s sitting in management — all the layers between you and them.'”
Musk has also been known to fire, at once, all employees who disagree with his decisions.
According to The New York Times and weeks later, as the president of Twitter — now X — Musk would have had a team searching the company’s internal messages for employees who appeared insubordinate and then fired those workers. In related jest, many former workers, whom Business Insider writer Kali Hays had spoken with years earlier, also reportedly said they were terminated for their views of Musk.
A similar incident occurred at SpaceX this year, where a cohort of employees was reportedly laid off shortly after the group wrote an open letter to company leadership characterizing Musk as someone whose actions “commonly make working at Tesla no easy task” by being “a source of distraction and embarrassment for us.” The National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint against Musk for the unfair dismissal of the employees.
Levenson said that to at least try to address employee outcry or discord within the company, it is pertinent there at least is a feeling in the employees that they can talk to the organization about issues or misgivings related to the company internally.
In March, the NLRB also said that the Musk company, SpaceX, had illegally required workers it fired or laid off to sign agreements not to speak against the company or join class-action lawsuits.
Management practices Musk has, however, issued a challenge in court. Former janitors in Twitter’s New York office sued him in June 2023, stating that he “owes hundreds of thousands of dollars in back wages”. Other former Twitter employees and executives had lodged suits against Musk on account of unpaid severance money. Here is the Musk playbook according to a lawsuit filed by four former Twitter executives: to keep the money he owes other people and force them to sue him. Even in defeat, Musk can impose delay, hassle, and expense on others less able to afford it. Spokespeople for Musk, Tesla, X, and SpaceX did not immediately return requests seeking comment.
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