News
SpaceX lays off 10% of staff by email as Falcon Heavy, BFR, and Starlink ramp up
In an unusual move for a privately-held company that raised $500M-750M in the last six months alone and is the 2nd or 3rd most-valuable VC-backed entity in the United States (~$30B), SpaceX abruptly announced a decision to lay off ~10% of its workforce of 7,000+, effective immediately as of January 11th.
Although layoffs are often a necessary evil in particularly competitive industries or underperforming companies, SpaceX is not exactly a strong fit for either characteristic. The company also opted for a truly bizarre and impersonal layoff method so unfriendly that several employees described it feeling like a corporate “Hunger Games” or a “purge”.
https://twitter.com/seanbhart/status/1084139223760945152
Over the past six or so months, a number of reports – most recently confirmed by SEC filings showing ~$270M of $500M raised – noted that SpaceX was seeking considerable investment and capital influx in the form debt (a leveraged loan) and equity sales to the tune of $250M (loan) and $500M (equity) after some back and forth with investors and banks and additional fine-tuning. The terms of SpaceX’s 2018 fundraises are unknown but Bloomberg did acquire information suggesting that the company was only profitable or break-even with after a range of very specific and dubious accounting decisions. Put more bluntly, SpaceX did not demonstrate actionable profitability to investors during their 2018 pitches.
“[SpaceX showed] positive earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization of around $270 million for the twelve months through September … But that’s because it included amounts that customers had prepaid and because it excluded costs related to non-core research and development. Without those adjustments, earnings for the period were negative.” – Bloomberg, 19 November 2018
However, the fact of the matter is that SpaceX’s profitability is and has long been nearly irrelevant as long as the company was still able to convince investors that it was wisely investing its funds in potentially revolutionary present and future projects like Falcon Heavy, reusable rockets, BFR, and Starlink. Essentially, if SpaceX could show that they could be profitable if they wanted to be, investors were willing to swallow unusual risks in return for prestige and a potentially vast payout down the road. The decision to lay off 10% of the company’s workforce immediately after raising anywhere from $500-750M could indicate that layoffs were either directly or indirectly related to the terms of its fundraising rounds.
When you're talking about 850 layoffs across the company, there's no way even the best company at hiring/firing decisions is going to avoid making tons of mistakes about who they kept and who they let go.
— Jonathan A. Goff (@rocketrepreneur) January 12, 2019
Notably, some basic back-of-the-napkin estimates would suggest that cutting 10% (say 700-800 employees) at an average salary (or equivalent hourly pay) of ~$90K/year* with an average overhead of 30% would reduce SpaceX’s operational costs by $80-100M annually, potentially enough to sway the above financial account enough to show a small annual profit or at least allow the company to break even. Put frankly, $80-100M per year is not nearly enough to plausibly fund SpaceX’s BFR and Starlink development programs at anything close to the ambitious schedules CEO Elon Musk has laid out for the company, including orbital BFR launches as early as 2020 and getting Starlink to initial operational status around the same time (2020-2021).
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- Falcon 9 Block 5 booster B1049. (Pauline Acalin)
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- Falcon Heavy clears the tower. (Photo: Tom Cross/Teslarati)
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- BFR (2018) breaks through a cloud layer shortly after launch. (SpaceX)
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- SpaceX’s Starhopper seen in a January render and a January photo. (SpaceX/Elon Musk)
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- One of the first two prototype Starlink satellites separates from Falcon 9’s upper stage, February 2018. (SpaceX)
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- SpaceX’s first two Starlink prototype satellites are pictured here before their inaugural launch, showing off a thoroughly utilitarian bus and several advanced components. (SpaceX)
However, saving ~$100M annually might be enough to sway investors that are less prestige-hungry and more conservative to bet on a successful but still relatively high-risk launch company. To be even more generous, one could assume that ~800 employees were strategically cut to remove entire internal groups or departments no longer needed, perhaps doubling or tripling the annual savings to $200M-$300M, still not even close to enough money to fund more than 10-20% of expected BFR and Starlink capex.
In September 2018, CEO Elon Musk estimated the new rocket would cost ~$5B to develop (no less than $2B, no more than $10B) on its own, entirely excluding the $10B COO/President Gwynne Shotwell estimated SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet constellation would cost to complete in April 2018. Working on profits of less than $300M a year, it would take SpaceX decades of stable earnings to foot that collective $12B-20B bill.
“To continue delivering for our customers and to succeed in developing interplanetary spacecraft and a global space-based Internet, SpaceX must become a leaner company. Either of these developments, even when attempted separately, have bankrupted other organizations. This means we must part ways with some talented and hardworking members of our team. We are grateful for everything they have accomplished and their commitment to SpaceX’s mission. This action is taken only due to the extraordinarily difficult challenges ahead and would not otherwise be necessary.” – SpaceX, January 11
* (Source: Payscale)
A new level of “counterintuitive”
Regardless of whether SpaceX had sincere and angelic motivations for these layoffs (it’s nearly impossible to know), the single most unpleasant aspect of the whole ordeal is how the company managed it and communicated with employees. According to comments and hints from a dozen or more employees, the process began with next to no official warning around lunchtime on Friday, January 11th. Employees attended an all-hands meeting where they were told in frank terms that a major portion of the company – those deemed to be lower performers – would be laid off within 24 hours. All 7000+ employees were told around the same time.
The catch: nobody was told who exactly would be cut – instead, SpaceX would force every single employee to leave work early on Friday and spend 12-24 hours in total uncertainty until an unspecified time on Saturday, when they were – in theory – supposed to receive an email telling them whether or not they still had a job waiting for them on Monday. In many cases, workers were forced to call a number provided by SpaceX and ask the company themselves if they still had jobs, not even receiving the absolute minimum courtesy of some sort of call or notification. Whether the given employee was five months or five years senior, the process was identical – ~24 hours of avoidable existential uncertainty followed by an automated email or phone call that you had to make yourself.
Nobody was offered a clear explanation as to why they were chosen out of all SpaceX employees. Workers who had given their heart, soul, blood, sweat, and tears to SpaceX for more than half a decade were – very literally – fired over email without the simplest explanation and told to not return to work unless returning company property, effective immediately. Thanks to California’s WARN Act protections, all laid off employees in California will thankfully be paid for two additional months (until March 11, 2019) to support job searching and re-training.
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- A bittersweet sunrise as Falcon 9 B1049 arrives in port. (Pauline Acalin)
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- Workers process Falcon 9 B1048 after recovery. (Pauline Acalin)
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- Workers process Falcon 9 B1046 after the booster’s third flawless launch and landing in seven months. (Pauline Acalin)
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- SpaceX recovery technicians work on Falcon 9 with similar cherry-picker lifts, offering a sense of scale of the new Starship water tower. (Pauline Acalin)
It’s impossible to know who exactly within SpaceX thought this method of layoffs was preferable to something at least a modicum more humane. It’s equally unclear why these layoffs are happening now, and SpaceX’s official statement appears to be an unsatisfactory half-answer at best. To the 90% that remain, one can only wish them the best and hope that those 10% cut from the company were not all as essential as some of them seem to have been. In the meantime, it appears that SpaceX will continue to push ahead in attempts to improve Falcon 9 reusability, field the next Falcon Heavy, build out and launch Starlink, and develop BFR.
Some of those at SpaceX responsible for enabling the company’s many, many extraordinary achievements hopefully still remain and will be able to ensure that the company keeps heading down the right paths in spite of major speedbumps like this. If you or anyone you know knows someone who works at SpaceX or have been inspired by the company’s mission and many successes in spite of the odds, make sure to be cognizant and appreciative of the tens or hundreds of thousands of rewarded (and unrewarded) hours of hard work that go into every single major and minor SpaceX achievement. To any employees reading, thank you for your dedication and keep fighting the hard fight.
Happy Labor Day! We feel so lucky to work with such an awesome team @SpaceX. pic.twitter.com/aXQXN3fGlA
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 3, 2013
Elon Musk
Elon Musk rips ABC News over fatal NYC Tesla crash report
Musk pushed back on NYC Tesla crash coverage, pointing to a pattern of premature blame.
Elon Musk pushed back overnight against media framing of a fatal Tesla crash in Midtown Manhattan, telling a user on X that “it wasn’t the car” and that the vehicle’s Autopilot system had nothing to do with the wreck.
The crash happened just before 3 a.m. Wednesday, when a 2024 Tesla Model Y struck a sidewalk shed outside 315 Madison Ave., a bus stop pole and a mailbox on East 42nd Street, according to the NYPD. The car kept moving several more blocks before stopping near Second Avenue. Both women inside, each 27, were taken to Bellevue Hospital, where the passenger was pronounced dead. The driver was charged with vehicular manslaughter, driving while ability impaired and leaving the scene of an accident.
Police have not attributed the crash to Autopilot or Full Self-Driving in any public statement. The charges point to impairment, not software. Musk’s response followed a since-deleted ABC News post that he said mischaracterized the incident. Replying to a user on X, Musk wrote that if Autopilot had been engaged, “they would not have crashed,” and added that “the legacy media will never forgive Tesla for failing to advertise with them,”
The legacy media will never forgive Tesla for failing to advertise with them
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 9, 2026
It’s a familiar cycle for Tesla. In June, headlines from several national outlets described a fatal crash in Katy, Texas, as happening while the car was “on autopilot,” based on the driver’s own account to police after his Model 3 struck a home and killed a 76-year-old woman. Tesla’s data told a different story when Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s head of AI, said the driver had pressed the accelerator to 100% and reached 73 mph in a residential zone. Harris County prosecutors later confirmed the human override and the driver was charged with manslaughter.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis pointed to that same Katy crash last month to argue that outlets routinely name Tesla in crash headlines while leaving other automakers unnamed, even after a driver’s own actions are shown to be the cause. A similar pattern played out in 2024, when Musk had to clarify that FSD was never even downloaded onto the Model 3 involved in a fatal Colorado DUI crash, despite a passenger’s claim that an “auto drive feature” was in use.
Tesla has not issued a separate statement on the Manhattan crash beyond Musk’s posts on X. The NYPD’s investigation is ongoing, and no cause for the driver losing control has been released.
Tesla’s two recently-defunct flagship models, the Model S and Model X, are getting a big upgrade, according to the company’s Head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy.
Older Hardware 3 Model S and Model X vehicles have been the last major holdouts in Tesla’s Full Self-Driving v14 Lite rollout, and that wait now appears to be ending.
Tesla brings closure to flagship ‘sentimental’ models, Musk confirms
At Tesla’s Cybercab launch, AI chief Ashok Elluswamy told Ryan McCaffrey that he thought the S and X build “was supposed to go out last week.” Evidently, Elluswamy expects the suite to be rolled out to those HW3 Model S and Model X very soon:
For my @Tesla friends – and specifically Model S & X owners with HW3 who are waiting on FSD v14 Lite – I spoke to @aelluswamy at the Cybercab launch, & when I asked for an ETA on v14 Lite for S/X owners, he said, “Oh, I thought it was supposed to go out last week.”
So: soon! 🙌
— Ryan McCaffrey (@DMC_Ryan) September 7, 2026
Those cars are not the current Model S and Model X, which already ship with Hardware 4. They are the pre-refresh flagships built around Tesla’s older Autopilot computer, often called HW3 or AI3.
Tesla stopped putting that computer in new vehicles years ago, which is why owners treat these S and X cars as a closed generation. Model 3 and Model Y vehicles on the same computer began receiving v14 Lite in late June 2026 and saw a wider North American expansion in July. South Korea followed as an early international market. The S and X versions of the same software never joined that wave.
v14 Lite is Tesla’s way of squeezing the current v14 driving stack onto hardware that cannot run the full AI 4 model. The company describes the process as distillation: behaviors learned on the newer computer, including reinforcement learning and offline models, are compressed so the older chip and cameras can use them as a guide.
Early descriptions put the distilled network at roughly 15 percent of the original size. The result is still supervised Level 2 driving. Tesla has been clear that HW3 cannot support unsupervised Full Self-Driving or robotaxi operation because of memory and bandwidth limits.
The feature list is what made the wait so frustrating for S and X owners, as plenty of new features are to be shipped with it.
Official notes for the first Lite build, firmware 2026.20.5.1, added parking, unparking, and reversing; arrival options for a parking lot, street, driveway, or curbside; speed profiles that stay available at all times; and start-from-park engagement. Tesla also claimed better handling of merges, forks, pedestrians, traffic lights, and cut-ins, plus fewer false slowdowns and smoother lane centering.
A mid-July follow-on build, 2026.20.6.10, added more of the Hardware 4 interface, including a standalone Self-Driving app and the ability to start a trip from Park without a brake-pedal confirmation.
Elluswamy called that version the one “likely going to wide release.”
That wide release already reached most other HW3 cars in the United States and Canada. International timing still depends on regional validation and regulatory approval. For S and X owners, the remaining work appears to be model-specific validation rather than a new software stack.
There is no official Tesla changelog or build number for those two models yet, only Elluswamy’s offhand timeline. Some HW3 drivers who already have Lite report large gains over v12.6; others have described new indecision or phantom braking. The next test will be whether the same software lands cleanly on the older flagships that have waited the longest.
Yesterday, we reported on Tesla Cybertruck getting some major adjustments from a manufacturing standpoint in an effort to make the all-electric pickup more cost-effective, more reliable, more serviceable, and more easily produced.
Tesla Cybertruck engineer reveals new changes in ‘constantly evolving’ pickup
One of those changes was the addition of a self-reinforcing polypropylene aero shield that sits underneath the truck. Previously, Tesla utilized aluminum for this, but the self-reinforcing polypropylene was more durable while also being cheaper and lighter.
Tesla has revealed another small change it made to the Cybertruck, and it has to do with the side repeater cameras.
Tesla does not wait for a new model year to improve its vehicles. On September 8, Cybertruck lead engineer Wes Morrill posted side-by-side photos of an updated side repeater camera housing now rolling off the line at Gigafactory Texas.
The triangular camera pod mounted on the front fender looks almost identical at first glance. A closer look reveals a revised contour that uses the air already flowing around the truck to keep the lens clearer in rain and road spray.
The side repeater camera was updated – the version on the left is the newer part which uses passive geometry to create airflow disturbance that better keep water off the lens while driving. No cost penalty, just pure vision improvement. pic.twitter.com/wAbXtcL1Jf
— Wes (@wmorrill3) September 8, 2026
The side repeater cameras sit in an exposed position on the Cybertruck’s angular stainless-steel body.
In wet weather, they readily collect water droplets that can degrade the image Autopilot and Full Self-Driving use for lane changes and blind-spot monitoring. Early production trucks sometimes left owners wiping lenses by hand or accepting temporary restrictions on driver-assistance features.
Tesla has added washers to cameras on certain other models and on Cybercab prototypes, but those active systems add cost, complexity, and extra potential leak points.
The new housing solves the problem with passive geometry. Subtle changes in the surround create localized airflow disturbances as the vehicle moves. Those eddies physically push water droplets away from the optical surface. Morrill called the result “pure vision improvement” achieved at “no cost penalty.” Once the production mold is updated, every subsequent part costs the same as the original.
The advantages compound quickly. Clearer cameras in rain improve the reliability of driver-assistance features precisely when they are needed most. The design consumes no extra energy and introduces no new failure modes.
New Cybertrucks built after the tooling changeover receive the updated part automatically. Some owners of trucks delivered as late as June 2026 have already confirmed they received the revised housing. Retrofit questions have appeared in replies, and the cameras appear electrically compatible, though Tesla has not announced an official service program.
A few millimeters of reshaped housing will not make headlines the way a new battery pack does, but these changes are incremental and increase the Cybertruck’s effectiveness as a vehicle over time.
This improvement illustrates how Tesla continues to refine the Cybertruck after volume production began. Better wet-weather vision, zero added cost, and no extra hardware add up to a meaningful gain in everyday usability and safety.
Elon Musk rips ABC News over fatal NYC Tesla crash report
Tesla’s two defunct flagship models are getting a big upgrade
