Tesla ends hiring freeze, but only for one department

Tesla has evidently ended its hiring freeze that started last month with a series of layoffs, but it appears to be only for one department.

I bet you can guess which one.

Over the past month, Elon Musk initiated significant layoffs across Tesla’s entire organization. We estimate that about 15% of the company has been laid off.

At the same time, Tesla implemented an hiring freeze.

The company’s career website showed no job listings other than a few educational programs for students.

Now, Tesla appears to have ended its hiring freeze as it has started to list many new positions on its career website:

As you can notice, all of these job postings are in the ‘Autopilot & Robotics’ category.

They are all related to Tesla’s self-driving effort and humanoid robot program.

Electrek’s Take

One of my main takeaways from Elon’s wrecking ball month at Tesla is that the CEO is positioning Tesla less as an automaker and more as an AI company.

He fired many workers related to its automotive engineering and manufacturing business. Canceled two vehicle programs, fired the whole Supercharger team, even though that was more about sending a message to other executives rather than any major change of plan regarding charging, and now Tesla is restarting its hiring effort with AI.

For better or worse, this seems to be in line with that.

Elon shifted some of Tesla’s resources meant for the cheaper $25,000 car to the Robotaxi, which is going to be unveiled in August, but as wild as it sounds, Tesla still needs to solve self-driving for this vehicle program to be worth anything.