Tesla Laid Off 200 Autopilot Employees
It’s a stressful time at Tesla. The company was already under a federal investigation for crashes linked to its semi-autonomous vehicles, and then its eccentric CEO decided, seemingly out of nowhere, that we wanted to aquire Twitter. That impulse buy attempt ended up driving Tesla’s stock price down.
In the middle of all that drama, the company announced it would move to axe 200 of its 350 employees working on Autopilot, the seeming crown jewel of Tesla that Musk has said is critical to the company’s long-term growth. Tesla completely shut an entire San Mateo, California office in the process. The majority of these employees were reportedly low-wage workers working to analyze Autopilot’s massive collection of real-time driving data through data labeling and other techniques.
