In April 2024, Musk made yet another surprising decision: He fired nearly 500 employees within the Tesla Supercharging team, including the director of charging for North America. But now, less than a month later, Musk has hired many of them back. 

The proclamation explained that existing members of the team would focus on finishing charging stations under construction and build a few “critical” new ones. 

Musk has made it his personal mission to ensure the United States, as well as many other countries in Asia and around the world, were prepared to go electric by offering to install charging stations wherever necessary. He even made several deals over the past couple of years that promised other automotive companies that their customers could use Tesla stations to charge their electric vehicles. 

However, one only has to look at Musk’s history to understand that he often makes rash and sweeping decisions like this one.

However, the uber-famous billionaire is not known for his patience, caution or prudent decisions. In fact, he has quite a reputation as a bad boss, mostly because of his impulsive, out-of-nowhere firings. 

But just ten days later, Musk retracted his statement. Instead of firing thousands of people, Musk announced that they would instead be raising the prices of their electric vehicles. 

But only weeks after the announcement, Musk was begging hundreds of the thousands of employees he fired to come back and work for him. Once again, showing the businessman’s incredible impulsivity and almost constant backtracking. 

Because of Musk’s history, the announcement wasn’t all that surprising. However, some argue that the CEO was essentially forced to backtrack as he received extensive backlash for the decision from investors, other automobile manufacturers and his own employees. 

Neither Musk nor the director of charging for North America, Max de Zegher, have responded to the press to comment on the situation. But Musk made another contradictory announcement regarding the team’s current budget. 

But then, less than two weeks later, he suddenly posted on X, “Just to reiterate: Tesla will spend well over $500M expanding our Supercharger network to create thousands of NEW chargers this year. That’s just on new sites and expansions, not counting operations costs, which are much higher.”

Tesla Charging wrote, “Thank you to site hosts & suppliers for your patience as we restructure internally!” Though the “restructuring” has yet to be explained, it certainly makes it seem like Musk’s contradictory decisions were all part of his “plan.”

So, while Musk hasn’t said so just yet, it’s highly likely that a new Tesla will cost a lot more by the end of 2024 than it does now. As Musk would probably say, if he has to spend more, customers have to spend more.