Tesla Had Some Inadequate Employees, So It Fired Them

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Tesla Had Some Inadequate Employees, So It Fired Them

© courtesy of Tesla Motors Inc.

Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA) has been cited as one of the best places to work in the United States, particularly for employees interested in high tech. However, it is also a place where hundreds of people have been fired for not measuring up to Tesla’s standards, whatever they may be.

Tesla said the dismissals were not layoffs, according to the San Jose Mercury News. The company told the paper: “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.”

If Tesla management is being earnest, it is just like any other company, with the exception of being famous and on the cutting edge of its industry.

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Perhaps other car companies go through a similar process and dismiss hundreds of workers for being substandard just as Tesla does. These layoffs do not get covered by the media, either because they are a tiny fraction of the huge employee bases of the world’s largest manufacturers, or because what goes on at boring companies does not matter.

Tesla has suffered from a great deal of bad news recently. Some of its Model X vehicles were recalled. Production of its Model 3 has been too slow. Shareholders seem to be happy, however. Tesla’s stock is up 63% this year to $355. The company has a market cap of $59 billion, even though it produces a small fraction of the number of cars the much larger industry leaders produce.

But, even if the employees dismissed are also shareholders, that 63% is not much comfort.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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