Tesla interns say offers are revoked weeks before their start date

(Bloomberg) — The latest victims of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting: summer interns.

Tesla Inc. is rescinding offers just weeks before internships were to begin, prompting aspiring employees to take to LinkedIn to appeal to other employers to take them on.

“At 8:46 am, I opened an email from Tesla for flight information. By 11:25 a.m., my internship offer was gone,” wrote Joshua Schreiber, a student at the University of Miami, who said he was three weeks away from his start date and had already spent “thousands of dollars on housing.”

Schreiber, like many other aspiring Tesla interns, is getting dangerously close to the end of the school year. They say surprise calls from Tesla informing students that their offers are no longer valid have left them without much time to find replacement summer jobs.

In one case, a current Tesla employee posted on LinkedIn, asking her own virtual network to step up and hire one of the automaker’s interns due to start soon. “Please make our loss your gain!” wrote Diana Rosenberg, who works in battery supply at Tesla, according to her profile.

Rosenberg attributed the decision to rescind the internship offer to the mass layoffs taking place at the automaker.

Last month, Musk announced that Tesla had “made the difficult decision to reduce our workforce by more than 10% globally.” Since then, several executives have left the company as Musk pushed for more cuts. The division and its newly formed marketing division have been eliminated, Bloomberg News reported.

People familiar with Musk’s thinking have said the billionaire is determined to reduce his staff amid falling electric vehicle sales and big expenses for his Robotaxi dreams. They say Musk is aiming for a 20% reduction, Bloomberg reported.

Read more: Tesla is consumed by chaos as it shifts toward Musk’s Robotaxi dream

Tesla is not likely to save much money by revoking intern offers. At least one of the positions was for an unpaid position, while paid internships at the automaker typically offer between $18 and $28 an hour, according to Glassdoor data.

But the decisions will have an impact on the company’s hiring process: More than 3,000 university and community college students around the world are hired for internships at Tesla each year, according to the company’s latest Impact Report. “Do meaningful work from day one,” reads the company’s internship website.

The move has also given a harsh life lesson to the students.

“Rejection is a redirection,” wrote Brook Gura, a communications student at the University of Texas at Austin, who said she received a call informing her that her offer had been withdrawn three weeks before her start date as part of mass layoffs. of the company. “I’m incredibly disappointed to not have the summer I intended to have, I know this moment will only help me get stronger as a professional.”

Gura, Schreiber and Rosenberg declined to comment beyond their posts. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.

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