Energy
Tesla is growing its workforce as rival carmakers cut jobs to catch up in the EV race
Tesla has a ton of things in the pipeline that will keep it busy for the foreseeable future — from building Giga Berlin, ramping the production of the Model Y in the US and China, rolling out the upcoming Cybertruck, Semi, and new Roadster, to further improving its core battery technology. In order to achieve these goals, Tesla has been on a hiring spree to acquire talent to boost its current workforce. In contrast, other carmakers have been cutting jobs as they start a difficult transition towards sustainable transportation.
“It’s hard to think of another company that has more exciting product and technology roadmap. So super-fired up about where Tesla will be in the next 10 years. If you look back 10 years from today to 2010, we will produce approximately 1,000 times more cars in 2020 than we produced in 2010… and we have also Solarglass and solar retrofit and Powerwall, Powerpack, all those things too. So where we will be in 10 years, very excited to consider the prospect,” Tesla chief executive and co-founder Elon Musk said during the company’s Q4 2019 earnings call.
Tesla Continues Its Push
Elon Musk has turned himself into a solar salesman and has kicked off 2020 by setting the stage for a Solarglass Roof installation ramp in the United States. Musk has also mentioned bringing the Solarglass Roof to other markets such as China and Europe. Aside from looking for roofers, it is also partnering with homebuilders and other residential industry players. Giga New York, where solar panels and other components are made, is also looking to add more employees to its workforce.
Tesla is also seemingly testing the waters to build Giga Texas, where it can potentially ramp the production of the Cybertruck and help its other facilities scale battery production. Amidst all this, Elon Musk has also announced that he will be hosting an AI hackathon to fish for talents who can potentially help accelerate the rollout of its Full Self-Driving suite.
Across the pond, Tesla is busy trying to prepare an industrial property in Grunheide to begin the construction of Giga Berlin, which is poised to go online next year. This Tesla Gigafactory in Europe aims to produce 10,000 vehicles per week and it will need a 12,000-strong workforce to do that. Giga Berlin is currently looking for people to help them in construction, engineering, manufacturing, and operations.
In China, Giga Shanghai is aiming to ramp production of the locally-made Model 3, while starting its program for the Model Y. Tesla is even looking for designers that would help it produce a new vehicle Tesla for the local market and the rest of the globe. Job openings for Tesla China skyrocketed 118% between October last year to February 2020 and have seen a 376% jump in the past year, according to Thinknum Alternative Data’s report. While the coronavirus outbreak in China slowed down job postings recently, the overall hiring activity of the Palo Alto, California-based carmaker is on the upswing across the globe.
Tesla is undeniably the leader in electric vehicles. Through the years, it has been trying to perfect its manufacturing processes, car software technology, and battery capacity. In fact, a recent Model 3 teardown by Nikkei Business Publications revealed that Tesla could be six years ahead of the competition on the hardware front. On the battery front, Consumer Reports recently validated its advantage over other carmakers, and we’re yet to hear the compelling story that will blow people’s minds Elon Musk promised come Battery Day in April.
Tesla Competitors Trying To Catch Up, But That’s All They Can Do — Try
While Tesla keeps on looking for new hires to help it bring its product and technology roadmap into fruition, other carmakers have been cutting jobs. As legacy automakers try to catch up on the electrification of its fleet, most of them need to lay off workers to free funds that they can use for research and development of technology that can come close to what Tesla has had for years.
Last December 2019, Daimler and Audi announced that it will cut 10,000 jobs as the major shift in vehicle technology happens. Audi is also getting rid of 9,500 jobs to free funds for its electrification efforts. Bloomberg News compiled data that revealed carmakers in Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom are eliminating around 80,000 jobs as they reassess their current workforce in an era of electrification. In China, electric vehicle startup NIO also retrenched about 20% of its workforce. Asian automotive leaders Toyota and Honda have also cut costs to bolster research and development of electric cars and ride-sharing programs.
Tesla has had its own challenges but the company is definitely thriving now, as evidenced by its tangible lead in the EV space. For Q4 2019, Tesla posted revenue amounting to $7.38 billion, beating Wall Street’s estimates. Maintaining profitability, it was able to generate $1.1 billion of free cashflow in 2019. Its stock price also saw a meteoric rise recently propelling its market cap value to $169.16 billion on Feb. 19.
The striking contrast affecting the labor force of Tesla and other carmakers paints the difficult task of traditional automakers who seemed to have been caught flat-footed in a rapidly changing auto industry. Not that these giant car brands do not have the money, but Tesla is just way, way ahead in electrification. With all the activities on the side of Tesla, perhaps legacy carmakers should indeed be frightened.
In a notable intersection of Big Tech powerhouses, Meta, led by Mark Zuckerberg, has partnered with Canadian energy infrastructure giant Enbridge on a significant renewable energy initiative that will rely on battery technology from Elon Musk’s Tesla.
The project, which was announced this week, marks another step in Meta’s aggressive push to power its expanding data center operations with clean energy, dispelling many of the complaints people have about them.
This new development is located near Cheyenne, Wyoming, and will feature a 365-megawatt (MW) solar farm paired with a 200 MW/1,600 megawatt-hour (MWh) battery energy storage system, also known as BESS. Tesla is providing the batteries for the project, valued at roughly $200 million.
The story was originally reported by Utility Dive.
This Wyoming project represents the first phase of Enbridge and Meta’s joint “Cowboy Project.” Once operational, it will deliver power to Meta’s regional data centers through Cheyenne Light, Fuel, and Power under Wyoming’s Large Power Contract Service tariff.
This tariff, originally developed in collaboration with Microsoft and Black Hills Energy, is designed specifically for large loads like data centers. It ensures that the renewable supply serves hyperscale customers without impacting retail electricity rates for other users.
The battery system will operate under a long-term tolling agreement, providing dispatchable capacity that enhances grid reliability. During periods of high demand, the utility can access the backup generation, addressing one of the key challenges of integrating large-scale renewables with the explosive growth of data center electricity demand driven by artificial intelligence.
This latest collaboration builds on prior joint efforts between Enbridge and Meta in Texas, including the 600 MW Clear Fork Solar, 152 MW Easter Wind, and 300 MW Cone Wind projects. Together with the Wyoming initiative, the companies have now partnered on roughly 1.6 gigawatts (GW) of combined solar, wind, and storage capacity.
The deal highlights the intensifying demand for reliable, low-carbon power from technology giants. Meta has committed to supporting its data center growth with renewable energy, joining peers like Microsoft and Google in seeking large-scale solutions. Enbridge’s Allen Capps described the project as “one of the larger utility-scale battery installations supporting U.S. data center operations and growth.”
The involvement of Tesla’s battery technology adds an intriguing layer, linking two of the world’s most prominent tech leaders—Zuckerberg and Musk—in the clean energy transition.
As data centers continue to drive unprecedented electricity load growth across the United States, projects like this one illustrate how hyperscalers are turning to strategic partnerships with traditional energy players and innovative storage solutions to meet both sustainability goals and reliability needs.
Elon Musk
Why SpaceX just made a $60 billion bet on AI coding ahead of historic IPO
SpaceX has secured an option to acquire Cursor AI for $60 billion ahead of its historic IPO.
SpaceX announced today it has struck a deal with AI coding startup Cursor, securing the option to acquire the company outright for $60 billion later this year, while committing $10 billion for joint development work in the interim. The announcement described the partnership as building “the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI,” and comes just days after Cursor was separately reported to be raising $2 billion at a valuation above $50 billion.
The move makes strategic sense given where each company currently stands. Cursor currently pays retail prices to Anthropic and OpenAI to the same companies competing directly against it with Claude Code and Codex. That means every dollar of revenue Cursor earns partially funds its own competition. With SpaceX bringing computational infrastructure to the Cursor platform, that could reduce Cursor’s dependence on OpenAI and Anthropic’s Claude AI as its providers. Access to SpaceX’s Colossus supercomputer, with compute equivalent to one million Nvidia H100 chips, gives Cursor the infrastructure to run and train its own models at a scale it could never afford independently. That one change restructures the entire unit economics of the business.
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Cursor’s $2 billion in annualized revenue and enterprise reach across more than half of Fortune 500 companies gives SpaceX something its xAI subsidiary currently lacks, which is a proven, fast-growing software business with real enterprise distribution.
For Cursor, SpaceX’s $10 billion in joint development funding is transformational. Cursor raised $3.3 billion across all of 2025 to reach that $2 billion in revenue. A single $10 billion commitment from SpaceX, even as a development payment rather than an acquisition, dwarfs everything Cursor has raised in its entire existence. That capital accelerates product development, enterprise sales infrastructure, and proprietary model training simultaneously.
The timing is deliberate. SpaceX filed confidentially with the SEC on April 1, 2026, targeting a June listing at a $1.75 trillion valuation, in what would be the largest public offering in history. The company is expected to begin its roadshow the week of June 8, with Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley serving as underwriters. Adding Cursor to the portfolio before that roadshow gives IPO investors a concrete enterprise software revenue story to price in, alongside rockets and satellite internet.
The deal also addresses a weakness that became visible after February’s xAI merger. Several xAI co-founders departed following that acquisition, and SpaceX had already hired two Cursor engineers, signaling where its AI talent strategy was heading. Cursor, for its part, faces a pricing disadvantage competing against Anthropic’s Claude Code.
Whether SpaceX exercises the full acquisition option before its IPO or after remains the open question. Either way, this deal reshapes what investors will be buying into when SpaceX goes public.
Elon Musk
Tesla Supercharger for Business exposes jaw-dropping ROI gap between best and worst locations
Tesla’s new Supercharger for Business calculator reveals an eye-opening all-in cost and location-based ROI projections.
Tesla has launched an online calculator for its Supercharger for Business program, giving property owners their first transparent look at what it really costs to install Superchargers on site and what kind of return they can expect.
The program itself launched in September 2025, allowing businesses to purchase and operate Supercharger hardware on their own property while Tesla handles installation, maintenance, software, and 24/7 driver support. As Teslarati reported at launch, hosts also get their logo placed on the chargers and their location integrated into Tesla’s in-car navigation, meaning drivers are actively routed there. The stalls are open to all EVs, not just Teslas.
We launched Supercharger for Business in 2025 to help companies get charging right. We found simplicity and transparency to be a problem in this industry.
We’re now sharing pricing and a financial calculator to help make informed decisions. The goal is to accelerate investments,…
— Tesla Charging (@TeslaCharging) April 8, 2026
The new online calculator, announced by Tesla on Wednesday with the note that “simplicity and transparency” have been a problem in the industry, lets any business enter a U.S. address and get a real cost and revenue model. A standard 8-stall V4 Supercharger site runs approximately $500,000 in hardware and $55,000 per post for installation, bringing an all-in price just shy of $1 million. Tesla charges a flat $0.10 per kWh fee to cover software, billing, and network operations. Businesses set their own retail price and keep the margin above that fee.
Taking a look at Tesla’s Supercharger for Business online calculator, we can see that ROI is not uniform, and the gap between a strong location and a poor one can stretch the breakeven point by several years.
The biggest driver is foot traffic and how long people stay. A busy rest station, hotel, or outlet mall brings in repeat visitors who need to charge while they’re already stopped, pushing utilization numbers higher and shortening payback time.
Tesla Supercharger for Business ROI calculator
Local electricity rates matter just as much on the cost side. Markets like California carry some of the highest commercial electricity rates in the country, which eats into the margin between what a host pays per kWh and what they charge drivers. At the same time, dense urban areas with high EV adoption tend to support higher retail charging prices, which can offset that cost if demand is strong enough. Weather also plays a role. Cold climates reduce battery efficiency and increase charging frequency, but they can also suppress utilization in winter months if drivers avoid stopping in exposed outdoor locations. Suburban and rural sites face a different problem: lower baseline EV traffic, which means a site with cheaper power and lower operating costs can still take longer to pay back simply because the stalls sit idle more often. Tesla’s calculator uses real fleet data to pre-fill utilization estimates by ZIP code, so businesses can run their specific address against these variables rather than relying on averages.
The program has seen real adoption. Wawa, already the largest host of Tesla Superchargers with over 2,100 stalls across 223 locations, opened its first fully owned and branded site in Alachua, Florida earlier this year. Francis Energy of Oklahoma and the city of Alpharetta, Georgia have also deployed branded stations through the program, as Teslarati covered in January.
Tesla now exceeds 80,000 Supercharger stalls worldwide, and the calculator makes the economic case for accelerating that number through private investment rather than company-owned sites alone.
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