Tesla’s head of Cybertruck manufacturing has left the company. It’s unclear if he was involved in yet another round of layoffs or if he left on his own accord.
Over the last month, Tesla has been conducting several major waves of layoffs across its entire organization.
At least 10% of the workforce has been let go, but Electrek has heard that as much as 20% of the entire headcount could be gone by the time everything is said and done.
Tesla’s automotive business, including charging and manufacturing, as well as new product launches, took the biggest hit as Elon Musk appears to be transitioning Tesla away from its EV manufacturing roots to focus on autonomous driving products.
Now, the latest Tesla executive to leave is Renjie Zhu, director of manufacturing in charge of Cybertruck production. He announced on LinkedIn:
After triumphing the epic launch of Cybertruck program and ramping the volume production line to the steady 1K/W throughput orbit for the past 16 months in GFTX, also 7 weeks after the 5th Tesla-versary, my adventure with this great company has come to an end.
Zhu was in charge of manufacturing operations for Tesla’s highly succesful Model 3 and Model Y production lines at Gigafactory Shanghai.
In 2023, he came to Gigafactory Austin after Tom Zhu, then the head of Tesla’s operations in China, was placed in charge of roughly Tesla’s entire automotive operations with the goal of replicating Tesla’s success in Shanghai at its North American factories.
Top comment by CMG30
If Tesla is going to bleed talent like this, they need to be able to attract new talent. At one point, everyone wanted to work at Tesla with/for Elon and they had no end of talented, ambitious, young engineers showing up at their door. With Elon exposing his real self to the world through twitter, combined with these kinds of random massive corporate morale killing moves... it's no longer guaranteed Tesla can replace the folks that Elon so casually throws overboard on a whim.
As we reported, Tom Zhu recently went back to China, leading the company’s effort there, and gave up his responsibilities in North America.
As for Renjie Zhu, it’s unclear if he left Tesla of his own accord or if he was let go as part of the layoffs.
We recently reported that some Tesla employees are leaving the company due to low morale at the company amid the layoffs.
The Tesla Cybertruck production ramp has been going about as expected, with Tesla achieving a production rate of 1,000 units in a week last month. The goal is 5,000 a week in the first half of next year.
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