Taylor Hill
- Elon Musk apologized to laid-off Tesla employees for incorrect severance packages, CNBC reported.
- The rare apology comes after the EV maker said at least 10% of the workforce was being laid off.
- Some workers previously told Business Insider they were offered two months' pay as severance.
Elon Musk apologized in an email to some laid-off Tesla employees after their severance packages were found to be "incorrectly low," CNBC reported.
"As we reorganize Tesla it has come to my attention that some severance packages are incorrectly low," Musk said in the brief email sent Wednesday, per the outlet. "My apologies for this mistake. It is being corrected immediately."
Some employees were offered two months of severance, which would be paid through June 14, five laid-off workers previously told Business Insider.
Sixty days' pay is the minimum that companies with more than 100 employees must give laid-off workers if there is no 60-day notice period before mass job cuts, according to the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.
The Tesla CEO sent an all-hands email Sunday night announcing the automaker was cutting more than 10% of its workforce. Some employees only learned they'd been affected after turning up for work on Monday. Some were told by security that if their ID badges didn't work, they no longer had jobs.
Ezekiel Love, who only joined Tesla in Austin about a month ago, was one such worker. He now says he can't pay rent after losing his job.
The mass layoffs come as Tesla faces a sharp slowdown in sales and rising competition from domestic manufacturers in China, its most important market outside the US.
Tesla also lost some senior executives amid the layoffs. Drew Baglino, who'd been with the company for 18 years and was most recently its head of powertrain and electrical engineering, resigned and said he'd made the "difficult decision" to leave.
Rohan Patel, public policy and business development VP, also announced his exit on Monday.
Musk is also grappling with lawsuits filed by four former executives of Twitter, now X, who are suing him for $128 million in unpaid severance. The plaintiffs, who were fired after Musk's Twitter takeover in 2022, are former CEO Parag Agrawal, former CFO Ned Segal, former legal chief Vijaya Gadde, and former general counsel Sean Edgett.
Tesla didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.