Tesla cuts staff by 9 percent

Tesla, in the midst of a challenging effort to transform itself from a niche producer of electric vehicles to a mainstream automaker, said Tuesday it was reducing its workforce by about 9 percent as it aims to become profitable.

The company’s chief executive, Elon Musk, said in a memo he posted on Twitter that most of the employees losing their jobs would come from salaried ranks, and no production workers at Tesla’s car plant in Fremont, California, would be affected.

Musk said the cuts were part of a “comprehensive organizational restructuring across the whole company,” which had about 37,500 employees at the end of last year, according to Bloomberg. He noted that Tesla had never produced an annual profit since it was founded 15 years ago.

“What drives us is our mission to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable, clean energy,” he said. “But we will never achieve that mission unless we eventually demonstrate that we can be sustainably profitable.”