Did Musk just kneecap Biden’s EV agenda?

May 01, 2024

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A Tesla electric vehicle charging station is seen in Falls Church, Virginia.

A Tesla electric vehicle charging station is seen in Falls Church, Virginia. | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

Elon Musk just threw a wrench into President Joe Biden’s electric vehicle plans.

Tesla’s renowned charging network is a backbone of the administration’s effort to get Americans out of gasoline-powered cars and into electric ones. But this week, Musk abruptly laid off almost all of Tesla’s Supercharger team, writes David Ferris.

“It feels like the rug just got pulled out from under a lot of the industry alignment that has been built in the last 12 months,” Matt Teske, CEO of the EV-charging software platform Chargeway, told David.

While past rounds of layoffs were spread among various Tesla divisions, Monday’s bloodbath targeted the jobs of hundreds of people on the EV charging team, including the unit’s top dog, Rebecca Tinucci.

“We need to be absolutely hardcore about headcount and cost reduction,” Musk said in an email to Tesla staff Monday, reported first by The Information. The layoffs come amid the company’s falling profits.

The move potentially undercuts a deal Tesla struck with the White House last year to open the company’s vehicle chargers to other automakers in exchange for accessing federal dollars.

And access Tesla did. The company won almost 13 percent of all EV charging awards from Biden’s 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, earning more than $17 million in infrastructure grants.

Tesla’s charging technology is now emerging as the industry standard in the U.S., baked into the designs for future EVs from numerous automakers and slated for inclusion in a nationwide network of charging stations.

Musk says Tesla will continue to build Superchargers. In a post on his social media site X, formerly Twitter, he wrote: “Tesla still plans to grow the Supercharger network, just at a slower pace for new locations and more focus on 100% uptime and expansion of existing locations.”

Some analysts David spoke with said the slower pace of expansion, while unexpected, may be a calculated move as other EV charging players expand in the arena.

But others questioned how Tesla will carry out an expansion, even a slower one, if the team in charge is nonexistent. No one David contacted for this story could name a single person in Tesla’s charging sector that still works there.

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Power Centers

The coal-fired Plant Scherer stands in the distance.

A coal-fired plant stands in the distance in Juliette, Georgia. | Branden Camp/AP

No coal pollution, except for emergencies
The Biden administration’s final climate pollution limits for power plants offer two exceptions sought by the Edison Electric Institute, a major utility trade group that has been broadly critical of the standards, writes Jean Chemnick.

One provision temporarily exempts fossil fuel power plants from the new standards during grid emergencies, and the other allows a facility an extra year to retrofit with carbon capture or remain in operation if grid operators can't line up replacement power generation in time.

Biden goes monument-happy
Biden has embraced his power to protect public lands, signing more proclamations to create national monuments in his first term than any president since Jimmy Carter, writes Jennifer Yachnin.

In part because of congressional gridlock on conservation issues, Democratic lawmakers, environmental advocates and tribal leaders are urging Biden to get even more aggressive. Administration officials have hinted they could get their wish.

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That's it for today, folks! Thanks for reading.

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We must have a serious conversation in this country about where we’re going and what it will take to realistically get there. Policymakers cannot overlook the laws of physics or the reality of the current situation.

The stakes are too high to get this wrong. As electricity demand grows and supply fails to keep up, bad public policy is making the problem worse. That’s why America’s electric co-ops are fighting for smarter energy policies that prioritize reliability and affordability for all.

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