Musk is just using the economic uncertainty to do what a lot of tech companies have done in the past. Staffing levels generally rise at big companies so periodic layoffs are necessary to clear the dead wood that always accumulate at all companies. I don’t remember who it was, but one CEO was famous for laying off 5% annually, based on performance review “grades”. The bottom 5% of employees were let go with no warning or appeal. I think it was Siebel, before Oracle bought them.
If you’re not panicking you haven’t been paying attention.
Or else you’re waiting for Jesus.
Jack Welch at GE cut the bottom 10% every year...
Jack Welch at GE did similar. Bottom 10%.
And being in the top 10% was no guarantee either. All steely-eyed bottom line calculus, heartless. Just like law and politics.
I believe what you say about “clearing the dead wood”. In fact, over the last couple years moving a significant part of the Tesla operation to Texas achieved that purpose too.
For a number of years, I was ordered to rank my chip-making engineering staff that way. I tried to explain to my boss that unlike other groups of engineers, I only hired and had '10' rated engineers.
One of the techniques I used to rank was to have each of my engineers rank themselves as #1 then rank all the other engineers in my group and give me the results. It was amazing, we all thought the same.
This is a shot across the bow by Musk. If I worked at Tesla, I’d get my butt back in the office and would forget about “working remote” for a while.