A Tesla manager who was recently fired for warning that CEO Elon Musk was ruining the company, Matthew LaBrot, has given an interview to give more details about the situation and how he doesn’t see Tesla coming out of it.
Last month, we reported on how LaBrot, a 5-year veteran manager at Tesla, led an effort to represent Tesla employees who believe CEO Elon Musk has become an obstacle to the company’s success through an open letter.
He called for Musk to resign:
The damage done to Elon’s personal brand is now irreversible and as the public face of Tesla, that damage has become our burden. We are now at a crossroads: continue with Elon as CEO and face further decline as customers abandon the brand, or move forward without him and allow our products and mission to succeed or fail on their own.
Unsurprisingly, he was quickly let go.
LaBrot has never given an interview with Hard Reset in which he went into a lot more detail about the situation.
First off, after being attacked by Musk fans, LaBrot established that he was a successful employee at Tesla.
He joined the automaker in 2019 as an assistant manager and quickly advanced through the ranks, becoming a general manager and subsequently transitioning to corporate roles in sales and training.
He said:
I think I added a ton of value, especially the last position. Every sales and delivery employee was being trained through my words. And I think that that shows the trust that Tesla had in me. It is kind of crazy to be on the outside now, no longer being a part of that.
LaBrot owns a Cybertruck and a Model Y. You can’t call him a Tesla hater.
He is a true believer in the mission to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles, and his job revolved around that:
You know, this wasn’t a new thing for me. Over my entire time at Tesla, I considered myself an activist for electric vehicles, and clean energy. For almost six years, I’ve been focused on overcoming misinformation about EVs and helping grow that mission. It has become easier in recent years, but in my first couple of years at the company, every sales conversation we would have involved trying to change people’s opinions. Once we hit a tipping point where the person who’s running this company is now pushing customers away from the mission, then the priority shifted. That priority was to be an activist to try to save the company.
The former Tesla manager explained that he used to admire Musk and that he even joined Twitter when he bought it, but he quickly got disillusioned by it.
From there, he reported starting to see growing difficulties trying to convince Tesla customers to upgrade and return to the brand, which he partly linked to what Musk was saying on the social media platform and his public support for people Tesla has been fighting in its mission to accelerate EV adoption.
When asked how Musk has been allowed to continue running Tesla amid all the various controversies, he said that he thought the board would act after Trump’s inauguration, but he saw them instead doubling down, allowing him to lead all-hands meetings by himself without other leadership.
He became the clear sole leader at Tesla.
LaBrott also highlighted how Tesla claimed that the decline in sales in Q1 was solely due to the Model Y changeover, as we have been extensively reporting over the last few months, the problem is much bigger:
Without speaking to anything that hasn’t been published — the Q1 numbers obviously came out and showed a decline. You’ll hear what they’re saying about while we were ramping up production, that’s why we didn’t sell very many cars. People were waiting for new Model Y. Fine. But now you can just use your eyes and drive by any location and see how many new Model Ys are available, in inventory. You can go to the Tesla website, and get almost any configuration of a new Model Y available same day. That is not how Tesla works. The company needs a backlog in orders to hit the delivery numbers that they have.
The former manager was pretty clear that he doesn’t see this trend getting reversed for anything other than Musk leaving and even also selling his stake in Tesla:
I don’t think that there’s anything he can do to change the people’s opinion that have decided they’re not going to support Tesla outside of him leaving. And even a lot of people that I’ve spoken to don’t even think that’s enough at this point. They want him to sell all his shares and things like that, which I don’t expect. I think for Tesla, as far as vehicle sales go, it’s game over.
He highlighted that he understands that Musk has been claiming he doesn’t care about EV sales anymore because he believes it’s all about autonomous driving and robots, which LaBrot actually likes as a long term goal, but he thinks the current EV sale trend will result in Tesla becoming unprofitable before it can get there.
LaBrot had a message to current Tesla employees:
For employees still there, collect your paycheck if you want, ride this thing down to the grave, that makes sense to me financially. But I think it’s just important for people to acknowledge that this is not going to get better with that guy in charge.
Though he sympathizes with people over the current job market and believes that companies are taking advantage of this situation, which discourages people from speaking out against situations like the one at Tesla.
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