Ex-Tesla employees reveal the cryptic ways they learned they were getting fired (TSLA)

On Tuesday,
Former employees told Business Insider they were surprised by the layoffs.
In May, Musk said the company would

This week, Tesla is firing around 9% of its employees in an effort to cut costs and eliminate redundancies, CEO Elon Musk said in an email to employees he shared on Twitter.

The move came as a surprise to some employees, who told Business Insider they were given no advance notice about the possibility of being fired. During Tesla's first-quarter earnings call in May, Musk said the company would restructure operations to boost profitability. At the time, he said the company would review its third-party contractors, though he didn't discuss specific plans to layoff company employees.

One former employee thinks more layoffs are coming

A former Tesla Energy salesperson who asked not to be identified by name said her team received an email at 1 a.m. on Tuesday morning asking them to clear four hours in their schedule that day for a video conference. The video conference turned into a conference call with a human-resources employee and Brent Baldwin, the company's director of energy sales.

During the call, 250 people, including the energy sales employee's entire training class, learned they would be let go, and Baldwin apologized for having to fire salespeople who had hit their quotas, the former energy salesperson said. Despite the apology, the former energy salesperson said she and her training class were made to feel as if they had failed the company.

But the former employee said she believes this round of layoffs won't be the last.

Employees were caught off-guard

Once his colleague left the conference room, she gathered her belongings and was escorted out of the building. The former delivery employee said he thought his colleague had been fired for performance reasons, but once he was called into the conference room, he said he realized his position was being eliminated.

He was given no advanced notice of the meeting before Monday. For each of the prior two weeks, he had worked 60 hours over six days, he said.

He had worked for Tesla since 2015 and said during his time at the company his team had to adjust to a sixfold increase in deliveries while being told to increase delivery speed. Despite the raised expectations, his team decreased from its original size.