BREAKING: SpaceX To Layoff 10% Of Its Workforce
LA Times- SpaceX, citing a need to get “leaner,” said Friday it will lay off more than 10% of its roughly 6,000 employees. The cuts were cited in an email sent to employees by President Gwynne Shotwell, which was provided to The Times. “This was a very difficult but necessary decision,” Shotwell wrote. “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,” the Hawthorne-based company said in a statement. “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.” Even with SpaceX’s ramp-up of satellite launches — 21 in 2018, up from 18 the year before, and on Friday the first one of this year — it has occasionally cut its workforce. Last summer, the company fired some senior managers at the company’s Redmond, Wash., office because of disagreements over the pacing of the development and testing of its Starlink satellite program.
Well shit. That’s not good news for Elon Musk and SpaceX employees. Talk about a steaming Friday news dump. I have an important question. Do successful companies layoff 10% of their workforce? Does that I’ve never once heard an executive say, “We are doing so well that we can’t possibly pay all these people. We’re doing so well that we’re gonna fire 1 out of every 10 employee.” I’m not smart and didn’t graduate college but those sure seem like competing ideas to me. Which is shocking because all I hear about SpaceX is that it’s this revolutionary company where, quite literally, the sky is the limit. So which is it? Revolutionary company or tanking piece of shit that has to fire a bunch of people?
Now we know why Elon has been tweeting out pretty pictures of his Starship rocket the last couple of days. They were a misdirect. They were a smokescreen. He was jingling car keys in front of our faces in hopes we wouldn’t see the dumpster fire burning in the distance. Elon knew this Friday news dump was coming and he quite literally wanted to be like, “Look over here! Look over here! Look at this shiny rocket! Pay not attention to the 6,000 people we’re about to lay off!” Well you wanna know how they’re gonna pay for that shiny new rocket? With all the money they’re saving by canning thousands and thousands of people! Good stuff as always, Elon.