The pro-Tesla cultists over at InsideEVs published an article Friday morning highlighting an ex-employee who revealed “what it’s really like to work for Tesla”.
But instead of highlighting the interview’s content right off the bat, the article starts by immediately making excuses for Tesla at the expense of short sellers, claiming that “instead of dealing just with production and sales issues, [Tesla] also has to deal with the so-called shorters.”
The article claims that short-sellers are “everywhere,” even in the media. You know, because public conventional auto makers like Ford and General Motors don’t have people shorting their stock.
Perhaps InsideEVs felt like they needed to cover for some of the statements the ex-employee made.
The article goes on to present an interview with an ex-Tesla employee from the company’s solar, delivery and customer support department.
He opines on several topics during his time at Tesla. While talking about wait times for customer service, he says:
“The long wait times. I could coordinate those directly with the number of people available to take calls. You could see an entire department. An entire row of computers and phones on Monday – and then on Tuesday, that whole row is empty.”
He talks about his customer support training, where he’s flown to California, only to witness the current customer support team “pulled off into another room and told they were going to be let go after 30 days.”
He continued, talking about layoffs:
“They took a 12 person team down to 2. It’s just ridiculous. I don’t know how they expected me and my colleague to handle the workload ourselves. It was ridiculous. We got back to Utah, we watched all our friends that we had been working with get fired, which was a horrible day. I came back to Utah and I cried.”
When talking about why he stayed at Tesla for so long, he said:
“Elon had the right idea. His mission is not to make a bunch of cars, it’s to save the planet. That’s why I was on board. That’s why I put up with all the crap that they put me through. Because that was the true message that Tesla was about. It’s not about making a car.”
He also claims that many people at the company are on their way out the door:
“I still have plenty of friends who still work there and they tell me it’s just getting worse. Most of them are just trying to wait it out – to get their full year in to get their stock options, then they’re gonna leave. I can’t say that I have a good feeling about it.”
In describing Model 3 quality, he said:
“I kinda made the joke that when a car would come in and there were parts missing off of it, I’d say that one came out of the tent. I had to remove tape [from cars being taped together]. They would deliver Model 3’s on a diesel, the driver would unload the cars, hand me the keys and I would take the cars down to parking storage. I had a list of customers that were coming in that day. I would have to move the cars down and prep them so they could be washed. Half of that was just me taking tape off the car. I found interior door panels were not held on by anything. No clips, just tape. It was a circus. It’s true. “
He claims that he faced some “very strange hiccups” at delivery that he couldn’t attribute to simple mistakes or plain stupidity. We have to ask: has he checked the tone at the top of the company yet?
The employee points out that he is suspicious that “a big part of the current employees” are just there to sabotage the company.
“It would not surprise me if there was about 25 percent infiltration from other companies, like Ford, Chevy… That is just there throwing monkey wrenches into it,” he says.
The notion was immediately ridiculed by hedge fund manager Jim Chanos, who Tweeted out “#FacePalm”.
“25 percent of employees may be there just to sabotage the company” #FacePalm @InsideEVs (Ht: @TESLAcharts) pic.twitter.com/kLXtDJ7uoH
— Diogenes (@WallStCynic) August 2, 2019
And in describing the future outlook, he offers this ominous sounding take:
“I’m scared, I’m hanging onto all the little trophies I got while I was at Tesla because I’m afraid that one day they’re going to be valuable because there’s not going to be any Teslas. I don’t have a great feeling.”
You can watch the ex-employee’s interview here:
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2KfQAip Tyler Durden