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For weeks, Tesla has been cutting staff left, right and center. First it was teams at its California and Texas hubs, then the brains behind the Supercharger network went and this week it was the interns. Now, an exec departing from the American electric vehicle maker has questioned the “long game” behind boss Elon Musk’s cuts at the automaker.
In a post on LinkedIn, Rich Otto, who worked with Tesla’s vehicle-engineering, creative, and content teams, slammed the recent wave of job cuts at the Cybertruck manufacturer, according to a report from Barron’s. Otto claimed the redundancies were having wide-reaching affects across the company, including cutting morale and even the company’s share price. As Barron’s explains:
Rich Otto announced his resignation from Tesla on LinkedIn on Wednesday. He appeared to question the company’s direction after it said it would lay off some 14,000 people in April.
“The recent layoffs that are rocking the company and its morale have thrown this harmony out of balance and it’s hard to see the long game. It was time for a change,” Otto wrote. “There’s a lot that I’ll miss about Tesla, its people being number one.”
Extensive job cuts at the EV maker have been the tip of the iceberg for its bad press in recent weeks. The rollout of its flagship Cybertruck electric pickup have been marred by high-profile manufacturing and quality issues, including problems that meant its accelerator pedals could slip and jam on full power. The company is also facing an investigation from the U.S. government over its handling of a recall relating to its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving software.
It should come as no surprise, then, that share prices in the company are taking a bit of a dive. Barron’s reports that the price of shares in Tesla was down 0.6 percent at $173.75. This followed a 1.7 percent dip in the share price on Wednesday following the news of Tesla’s layoffs.
Read more: Tesla quietly axed thousands of open jobs, pointing to a hiring freeze after Elon Musk’s layoffs
A version of this article originally appeared on Jalopnik’s The Morning Shift.