Where To Cut At Tesla

Photo: Patrick Pleul/dpa (Getty Images)

Word through the grapevine is that Tesla — the most valued automaker in the world by an incredible margin — is looking to cut staff. Nothing’s been officially announced, but managers have had to tell their bosses which folks are mission-critical — never a good sign. If only seven more workers had wanted a union.

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This begs the question, though, of where the company should start with its cuts. It might make sense to go for the elephant in the room, with the pay so obscene that it’s been struck down in a court of law, but that’s unlikely to fly. Luckily for the execs faced with those tough decisions, Bob chimed in to say where the true fat is in the company can be trimmed:

Of course! It’s all so simple. Tesla puts far too much time, money, and staff into ensuring precision craftsmanship for every vehicle that rolls off the assembly line. When you’re operating at Tesla’s massive scale, there’s only such a high bar you can set — eventually, you simply don’t have the resources for all those sigmas.

Perhaps Tesla has just flown too close to the sun; built cars that are too high-quality and too well-built for too long. Maybe it just ran the well dry, holding itself to such a high bar that it could never maintain the pace, the precision, the finery. Or, just maybe, the company has always been a Jenga tower of bad decisions and now Elon’s festivity-induced shaky grip has threatened to send the whole thing crashing down.

Congratulations, Bob, on your COTD win. Here’s a track about someone else who had all the right pieces in all the right places, and just couldn’t keep the tower standing.

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