Elon Musk gave a more precise estimate of the number of employees the company plans to lay off during. This comes as former Tesla employees are suing the electric vehicle manufacturer for allegedly firing many workers without giving them the advance legal notice.
Tesla has begun to lay off employees recently, and Musk’s message on how the company is carrying out the cuts has been unclear. In an email earlier this month, he told Tesla executives that he wanted to halt global hiring and eliminate 10% of the company’s workforce because he had a “super bad feeling” about the economy.
In a later tweet, he appeared to contradict himself, adding, “Total headcount will increase, but salaried should be fairly flat.”
Musk was asked in a video interview to specify how many of Tesla’s whole workforce he plans to lay off.
“Tesla is reducing the salaried workforce roughly 10% over the next probably three months or so,” Musk said.
“We expect to grow our hourly workforce. We grew very fast on the salaried side, and we grew a little too fast in some areas, and so it requires a reduction,” he added.
Musk stated that Tesla’s workforce is around 66 percent hourly and 33 percent salaried. “I guess technically, a 10% reduction in salaried workforce is only a 3% to 3.5% reduction in total employment,” Musk explained.
In addition, he also responded to a lawsuit filed by two former Tesla employees who were let go earlier this month.
Former employees said they were part of a 500-person layoff in Nevada and accused Tesla of violating the law by firing hundreds of staff on short notice. According to the duo, this violates the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.
However, Musk called the suit “pre-emptive,” “trivial,” and said it had “no standing.”
“That is a small lawsuit that has no consequence,” Musk added.