Tesla’s HR chief leaves company after swathe of job cuts

Yet another senior staff member at EV giant has followed hundreds of employees in leaving the company this week

Tesla’s top human resources executive has left the company following a mass layoff of hundreds of employees this week.

Allie Arebalo, the senior director of US HR at the automotive company, reportedly left her position recently, two unnamed people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.

It is unclear if Ms Arebalo was let go as part of the giant surge of job cuts at Tesla or whether she stepped down on her own accord. She has been working in the position since February 2023 and held various roles at Tesla for over six years.

The HR executive is one of hundreds of employees who have departed from the company in recent weeks after Elon Musk decided to let go of the team responsible for constructing its vaunted Supercharger charging stations.

Mr Musk later took to X, which he also owns, and insisted Tesla intended to still expand the network “just at a slower pace for new locations and more focus on 100% uptime and expansion of existing locations.”

Allie Arebalo latest senior Tesla executive to leave Elon Musk’s EV company (LinkedIn)

High-powered Supercharger stations are capable of putting hundreds of miles of range into a Tesla in around 30 minutes.

Around 500 employees were impacted by a round of layoffs at the company, which were announced in an email on Monday.

Ms Arebalo is not the only senior staff member to have left the company. Mr Musk said that two executives—Rebecca Tinucci, senior director of the Supercharger group, and Daniel Ho, head of new products—would be leaving on Tuesday, according to The Information.

While Ms Arebalo was based in Austin Texas, according to her LinkedIn profile, Mr Ho and Ms Tinucci were located in the San Francisco, California area.

It is unclear where the hundreds of other employees were based at the time of their termination.

Earlier this month, Tesla discounted five of their models by $5,000 to get more people to buy their vehicles after a sales slump. In the same week, the company announced it would be eliminating 10 per cent of its workforce, which totalled about 14,000 jobs across the globe.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks during live interview with Ben Shapiro at the symposium on fighting antisemitism on 22 January 2024 in Krakow, Poland (Getty Images)

Mr Musk wrote in an internal memo announcing the job cuts that there was “nothing I hate more” than cutting down the workforce, but the billionaire entrepreneur said the decision had been made to ensure the company was “lean, innovative and hungry for the next growth phase cycle”.

The same day that the mass job cuts were announced, two key Tesla executives revealed on X–also owned by Mr Musk–that they would be stepping away from the company.

This included Andrew Baglino, senior vice president of powertrain and energy engineering and Rohan Patel, senior global director of public policy and business development.

Tesla reported a 55 per cent drop in its first quarter profit in early April, with their stocks dipping below $150 per share, effectively wiping out all of the gains made in the last year. On Tuesday, Tesla stock dropped by five per cent.

Overall stock in Tesla is down around 26 per cent in 2024.

The Independent has contacted Tesla and Ms Arebalo for comment.