Tesla: 200 employees laid off in San Mateo
1. Juli 2022Tesla: 200 employees laid off in San Mateo
San Francisco, 7/1/2022
Tesla has closed its San Mateo, California, office, laying off an estimated 200 employees there.
According to Bloomberg, laid-off employees were hourly employees – the majority as annotation specialists. Their job is to tag data in videos taken by Tesla vehicles. This data is used to train for the company’s Autopilot driving assistance system. There seem to have been some problems with that recently. Rumors like this are doing the rounds: The employees were laid off for this reason, another team in New York would have been enlarged. There the earnings are even lower.
In a June 2 email to executives, Musk spoke of a „super bad feeling“ about the economic development. In that, he agrees with Raj Rajkumar, economics professor at Cornegie Mellon University. For him, the layoffs are a result of the lockdowns in China as well as higher raw material costs and supply chain issues.
