Elon Musk’s latest cost-cutting victims: summer interns.
You’re here Inc. rescinds offers just weeks before internships begin, prompting prospective employees to accept LinkedIn call on other employers to accommodate them.
“At 8:46 a.m., I opened a You’re here email for flight information. By 11:25 a.m., my internship offer had disappeared. wrote University of Miami student Joshua Schreiber, who said his start date was in three weeks and he had already spent “thousands of dollars on housing.”
Schreiber, like many other potential Tesla interns, is dangerously approaching the end of the school year. They say surprise calls from Tesla informing students that their offers are no longer valid didn’t give them much time to find replacement employment for the summer.
In one case, a current Tesla employee posted on LinkedIn, asking her own virtual network to step up and recruit one of the interns who were soon to start at the automaker. “Please make our loss your gain!” » wrote Diana Rosenberg, who works in battery supply at Tesla, according to her profile.
Rosenberg blamed the decision to rescind the internship offer on ongoing mass layoffs 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 Elon Musk pushed for further cuts. Most of the 500 people in the company’s Supercharger division and its new marketing division have been cut, Bloomberg News reported.
People close to Musk’s thinking have said the billionaire is determined to downsize amid falling electric vehicle sales and big spending on his Robotaxi dreams. They say Musk is aiming for a 20% reduction, Bloomberg reported.
Revoking internship offers probably won’t 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 data.
But these decisions will impact the company’s hiring process: More than 3,000 students from universities and community colleges around the world are hired for internships at Tesla each year, according to the company’s latest report . Impact report. “Do meaningful work from day one,” reads the company intern website.
This decision also gave a harsh life lesson to the students.
“Rejection is a reorientation” wrote Brook Gura, a communications student at the University of Texas at Austin, said she received a call informing her that her offer had been withdrawn three weeks before her start date as part of the company’s mass layoffs. “While I am incredibly disappointed to not have the summer I planned to have, I know this moment will only help me become stronger as a professional.”
Gura, Schreiber and Rosenberg declined to comment beyond their posts. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.
