Reuters reported on Friday that Tesla CEO Elon Musk wants to lay off around 10% of the company’s workforce due to his concerns about the global economy, citing an internal email sent to company executives, a move that could result in thousands of Tesla employees losing their jobs amid growing fears of a recession.
According to Reuters, Musk issued an email on Thursday imposing a hiring halt and expressing his “very awful feeling” about the economy.
Despite the alleged email, Tesla’s LinkedIn profile still shows more than 5,000 current new job vacancies as of early Friday morning.
Tesla and its subsidiaries had 99,290 active workers at the end of 2021, according to last year’s financial report.
Tesla’s Nasdaq-listed shares were down 3.8 percent in pre-market trade early on Friday morning as a result of the Reuters article.
$233.7 billion in total. According to Forbes’ real-time tracker, that is Musk’s entire net worth as of Friday morning, making him the world’s richest person. As the dispute over his intended acquisition of Twitter has played out, the erratic billionaire’s net worth has swung substantially over the last two months.
