“As with any company, especially one of over 33,000 employees, performance reviews also occasionally result in employee departures,” a Tesla spokesman told the Mercury News, which first reported the story. “Tesla is continuing to grow and hire new employees around the world.”
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Former and current employees told the News that the firings came with little warning. Impacted were engineers working on vehicle design and production, a supervisor and factory employees.
Earlier this month, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company reported it had delivered 26,150 vehicles in the third quarter of the year, of which 14,065 were Model S, 11,865 were Model X, and only 220 were Model 3.
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The automaker has blamed a “manufacturing bottleneck” for falling well short of its goal to produce 1,500 Model 3s in the quarter.
“We understand what needs to be fixed and we are confident of addressing the manufacturing bottleneck issues in the near-term,” Tesla said in its quarterly statement earlier this month.
Meanwhile, shareholders are watching. The company’s shares (Nasdaq: TSLA) were down, but only by 11 cents as of the close of trading Friday to $355.57.
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“Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk is known as a risk-taker, which has endeared him to Wall Street analysts and investors alike,” Charley Grant wrote in the Wall Street Journal this month. “There is a fine line, however, between setting aggressive goals and misleading shareholders.”
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