Elon Musk’s latest cost-cutting victims: summer interns.
Tesla Inc. cancels offers just weeks before internships begin, prompting aspiring employees to take to LinkedIn to approach other employers about accepting them.
“At 8:46 am I opened Tesla email for flight information. By 11:25 my internship offer had disappeared.” wrote University of Miami student Joshua Schreiber, who said he was three weeks away from starting and had already spent “thousands on housing.”
Schreiber, like many other potential Tesla interns, is perilously approaching the end of the school year. They say unexpected calls from Tesla telling students their offers were no longer valid left them with plenty of time to find replacements for the summer.
In one case, a current Tesla employee posted on LinkedIn asking her own virtual network to step up and find one of the interns who was soon to start working for the automaker. “Please make our loss your gain!” wrote Diana Rosenberg, who works in battery supply for Tesla, according to her profile.
Rosenberg blamed the decision to rescind the intern’s offer on mass layoffs occurring at the automaker.
Last month, Musk announced that Tesla had “made the difficult decision to reduce its workforce by more than 10% worldwide.” Several executives have since left the company as Musk pushed for further cuts. Most of the company’s 500-person Supercharger division and its newly created marketing division were laid off, Bloomberg News reported.
People familiar with Musk’s thinking say the billionaire is determined to cut headcount amid falling sales of electric vehicles and hefty costs to realize his robotaxi dream. They say Musk is planning a 20% cut, Bloomberg reports.
Withdrawing internship offers is unlikely to save Tesla much money. 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.
But these decisions will have an impact on the company’s hiring process: Every year, more than 3,000 university and college students from around the world are hired for internships at Tesla, according to the company’s latest report. Impact Report. “Do meaningful work from day one,” says website for company interns.
The move also provided a harsh life lesson for the students.
“Rejection is redirection.” wrote Brooke Gura, a communications student at the University of Texas at Austin, said she received a call that her offer had been revoked three weeks before she started due to mass layoffs at the company. “While I am incredibly disappointed that I will not have the summer I had planned, I know this moment will only help me become stronger as a professional.”
Gura, Schreiber and Rosenberg declined to comment on their reports. Musk did not respond to requests for comment.