“If the Emperor of Mars doesn’t want you…”
Gold Rush
One billionaire’s “super bad feeling” about the global economy is another billionaire’s hiring spree.
In the wake of Tesla’s latest round of widespread layoffs, several big tech companies — including both Microsoft and Amazon, led respectively by vocal Tesla CEO Elon Musk nemeses Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos — are snatching up ex-Tesla employees left and right, Business Insider reports.
OMW
According to LinkedIn data sourced by a private network of Fortune 500 executives called Punks & Pinstripes, rival electric vehicle manufacturers Rivian and Lucid picked up 90 of 457 recent Tesla departures between them.
Amazon and Apple — the latter of which has been trying to get a secretive and cursed autonomous car project off the ground for years — snagged 51 former Tesla employees each. Others migrated to other tech giants including Meta and Microsoft.
WFH
The hiring sweep comes on the heels of Musk’s anti-remote work decree, after which several companies — Amazon and Microsoft in particular, according to Insider — began to cast some pretty targeted recruiting nets.
“If the Emperor of Mars doesn’t want you, I’ll be happy to bring you over to [Amazon Web Services],” read a simmering LinkedIn post by Zafar Choudhury, a recruiter at Amazon, in response to the work from home drama, as quoted by Insider.
The surprise Tesla layoff announcement came just a few days later.
The EV company has had a rotten year so far. Tesla’s controversial, semi-automated driving tech is facing a massive government recall, while Musk is trying to rein in spending, referring to the company’s factories as “gigantic money furnaces.”
Clearly, Tesla’s got plenty of stuff to figure out — and its competitors are reaping the benefits.
READ MORE: Rivian, Amazon, and Apple are snapping up laid-off Tesla employees amid Elon Musk’s workforce-reduction plans [Business Insider]