Tesla job cuts continue, 229 employees from Autopilot team fired

In its latest round of layoffs, Tesla stated that it will terminate 229 additional San Mateo, California-based employees. The electric vehicle firm owned by Elon Musk disclosed the facts in a regulatory filing.

These employees were members of the Autopilot team. The San Mateo, California office had approximately 276 employees, and according to a report by TechCrunch, the remaining 47 employees may be transferred to the Buffalo Autopilot location.

The majority of the sacked employees were low-skilled and held low-paying positions, such as Autopilot data labelling, which entails verifying whether Tesla's computer correctly identified an object.

According to the article, these layoffs are part of the 10% labour cut that creator Elon Musk announced earlier this year.

The director of artificial intelligence at Tesla, Andrej Karpathy, who led the Autopilot vision team, also resigned without providing an explanation. Karpathy stated that he has no definite plans for the future but hopes to devote more time to his long-term interests in AI, open source, and education.

Musk notified the affected employees of the layoffs through email. The billionaire stated in an email that there will be layoffs and that he had a "terrible feeling" about the economy. Musk also stated in the email that "all hiring worldwide" has been suspended.

Some Tesla employees were terminated without a 60-day notice, in violation of the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act. This resulted in the filing of a lawsuit by two terminated employees in mid-June.