Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk has just further proved that he is serious about cutting costs at his automotive company amid a decline in sales. Tesla’s summer internship is the latest casualty of Musk’s cost-cutting initiative, and the students who were enrolled in the program are not happy.
Many students took to LinkedIn to share that they are looking for new opportunities after they were cut from Tesla’s summer internship program at the last minute, which they said inconvenienced them after they had already made housing and travel accommodations for the job.
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“I will no longer be interning at Tesla this summer,” wrote Josue Avalos Jimenez, a student at North Carolina State University, in a LinkedIn post. “After a single phone call of less than two minutes, my entire plan for this summer had vanished as if it had never even existed. Just a couple of days prior I had confirmed my living arrangement roughly nine hours away from home for my dream internship.”
Shubham Mahajan, who is a student at Raymond A. Mason School of Business, claimed in a post on LinkedIn that Tesla rescinding his internship was a “significant setback” especially after he made “necessary preparations, including travel and accommodations.”
“We often don’t discuss the impact of layoffs and internship cancellations on students, especially international students and professionals, but it’s a crucial conversation,” wrote Mahajan in his LinkedIn post.
The move from Tesla comes after Musk reportedly sent an email to staff on April 29 informing them that hundreds of employees will be laid off, and that they need to be “absolutely hard core” about future headcount reductions.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends the official opening of the new Tesla electric car manufacturing plant on March 22, 2022 near Gruenheide, Germany.
A few weeks earlier, Musk laid off 14,000 employees, claiming that the company has “grown rapidly,” and as a result, there has been a “duplication of roles and job functions in certain areas.”
Tesla has recently seen a decrease in vehicle sales. In its first-quarter earnings report for 2024, Tesla revealed that it sold 387,000 vehicles during the first quarter this year, which is roughly 100,000 less vehicles than it reported during the previous quarter and 8.5% less than the amount of vehicles it sold during the first quarter of 2023.
Tesla’s total automotive revenues also decreased by 13% year-over-year, and its total revenue declined by 9% year-over-year. In the report, the company attributed the decline in sales to “the early phase of the production ramp of the updated Model 3” and factory shutdowns due to “shipping diversions caused by the Red Sea conflict,” as well as an arson attack at the company’s factory in Berlin.
“If you’ve got cars that are sitting on ships, they obviously cannot (be) delivered to people,” said Musk during a recent earnings call that discussed the report. “And if you’ve got the excess demand for Model 3 and Model Y in one market, but you don’t have it there. It’s quite a(n) extremely complex logistics situation. So, I’d say also, we did overcomplicate the sales process, which we’ve just, in the past week or so, greatly simplified. So, it became far too complex to buy a Tesla, whereas it should just be you can buy the car in under a minute.”
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