10 Words Why You Should not to Work for Tesla
10 Words Why You Should not to Work for Tesla
Musk is trying to get his people to buy into the mission of ‘saving the world’ by working themselves to the bone. It’s not going to work.
Have you ever gotten an email from your CEO at 1 o’clock in the morning?
That’s about the time Tesla CEO Elon Musk sent a memo to Tesla employees last Friday, according to the Wall Street Journal. (Technically, it was 1:20 a.m. in California, where Tesla is based.)
And let’s just say the email wasn’t pretty.
After highlighting Tesla’s numerous accomplishments over the past year, Musk got down and dirty, announcing another round of job cuts–this time reducing the number of full-time employees by about 7 percent.
The job cuts are necessary, Musk argues, to help the company meet the unique challenges it faces. Challenges like “making our cars, batteries, and solar products cost-competitive with fossil fuels,” products that Musk admits “are still too expensive for most people.”
Musk also acknowledges that since Tesla is competing “against massive, entrenched competitors … [employees] must work much harder than other manufacturers to survive.”
All of this hard work is worth it, Musk says, to support the “mission of accelerating the advent of sustainable transport and energy, which is important for all life on Earth.”
It’s hard not to be inspired by this message.
Everyone–including the world’s major car manufacturers–knows the continued use of fossil fuels is not sustainable. And no one can deny that those companies probably wouldn’t be as vested in clean energy as they currently are if it weren’t for Tesla leading the charge.
But while I’m a fan of much of Musk’s philosophy, it’s the next part of the memo that worries me:
There are many companies that can offer a better work-life balance, because they are larger and more mature or in industries that are not so voraciously competitive. Attempting to build affordable clean energy products at scale necessarily requires extreme effort and relentless creativity, but succeeding in our mission is essential to ensure that the future is good, so we must do everything we can to advance the cause.
