Bea Beltran Tech 12.22.2022 02:Dec AM EST

Tesla To Start Laying Off Employees and Halt Hiring

It's not a good year for the tech billionaire as he faces obstacle after obstacle. To add to his woes, Tesla has been experiencing difficulties after its stock price dropped to about 65% this 2022, and the company's employees might be affected as well.

Musk Takes More Losses

Reports say that Tesla is planning to lay off staff, as well as refrain from hiring new workers. Although, there is still no specific number for the workforce reduction. It's not the company's first time freezing hiring, as mentioned in Gizmodo.

Tesla also announced a hiring pause back in June and predicted a 10% staff reduction based on Musk's assumptions about the economy. This eventually led to 200 job cuts for employees working on Tesla's Autopilot advanced driver assistance feature.

The EV company did recover after a few months and listed around 7,000 jobs on Tesla's website. This showed a 50% increase in Tesla's hiring compared to June, but evidently, the victory was short-lived.

According to Forbes, company officials have informed Tesla employees about the hire halt and layoffs, which are set to occur in the fiscal quarter starting next month. Speculations state that all of this can be traced back to Musk's acquisition of Twitter.

The Platform that Might be Musk's Downfall

Ever since Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, the tech billionaire has been facing not just losses but backlash as well. These have factored in with the failures that both Twitter and Tesla have been experiencing.

Musk has sold $40 billion worth of Tesla shares to shoulder the costs of acquiring Twitter. Even after that, Twitter still has interest payments that are worth $1.2 billion, which the tech mogul is yet to pay.

However, the Tesla CEO is not entirely blameless, as it was his actions that led to these events. Lately, some Tesla buyers have been backing out due to Elon Musk's behavior on Twitter. The said behavior can be linked to Musk's controversial tweets regarding sensitive topics.

The Twitter owner also suspended the accounts that tweeted about Jack Sweeney, the man behind @ElonJet which tracked the whereabouts of Elon Musk's jet. It appears that Musk's responses to critics are consistently unwelcoming.

Ross Gerber, an investor in both Twitter and Tesla, criticized the Tesla Board of Directors concerning the company's CEO. Predictably, the Twitter owner responded, and pettily as well, which is slowly becoming a defining trait for him.

He sarcastically replied, asking Gerber for his "great ideas." He continued and told Gerber to go back and read his old Securities Analysis 101 textbook. The Tesla investor responded by saying that he loves Tesla and supports Twitter, and he was only reaching out to help as a friend.

Speaking of pettiness, Musk also limited poll voting to Twitter Blue users. This new policy follows the outcome of the poll he tweeted, which decides whether or not he steps down as the social media platform's CEO. The final results, by the way, says that he should.