{"id":16623,"date":"2024-11-16T04:00:16","date_gmt":"2024-11-16T05:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=16623"},"modified":"2024-11-16T05:26:20","modified_gmt":"2024-11-16T05:26:20","slug":"how-elon-musk-cuts-costs-at-tesla-spacex-and-x","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=16623","title":{"rendered":"How Elon Musk Cuts Costs at Tesla, SpaceX and X"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Mr. Musk dug into his companies\u2019 budgets, preferring to cut too much rather than too little and to deal with the fallout later. Under Donald Trump, he is set to apply those tactics to the U.S. government.<\/p>\n

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On a Saturday morning in December 2022, Elon Musk summoned finance executives at Twitter, which he had bought<\/a> six weeks earlier, to a conference call. Then he drilled into a spreadsheet that contained the social media company\u2019s expenditures.<\/p>\n

Mr. Musk was angry, three people who were on the call said. Even though Twitter had just shed more than three-quarters of its employees \u2014 leaving it with just over 1,500 workers, down from nearly 8,000 \u2014 the company\u2019s spending still appeared to be out of control, the billionaire told attendees.<\/p>\n

Over the next six hours, Mr. Musk read out the spreadsheet line by line and asked workers to account for each item. He ordered some items \u2014 such as car services for executives \u2014 to be cut completely. At one point, he confronted an employee who was responsible for a multimillion-dollar contract related to website security and said his electric vehicle company, Tesla, spent far less on the same task. After the employee pushed back, Mr. Musk said she was no longer with Twitter.<\/p>\n

The meeting was characteristic of the approach that Mr. Musk has taken to cutting costs. Frugal to a fault, the 53-year-old has been intimately involved in hacking down budgets at his companies, including Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter, which he renamed X. Over nearly three decades as a tech entrepreneur, he has honed his penny-pinching by digging into minutiae and cutting as deeply as possible \u2014 often preferring to cut too much rather than too little, according to 17 current and former employees and others with knowledge of Mr. Musk\u2019s strategies.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Perhaps most importantly, Mr. Musk has been brutally unsentimental about the cuts, paying little regard to norms and conventions. The tech mogul has been unabashed about slashing costs to the point that corporate processes \u2014 and sometimes even product safety \u2014 break down, philosophizing that he can just fix things later, the people said. And he has been unafraid to offend, stiffing vendors<\/a> to negotiate better prices and sidestepping traditional suppliers to manufacture cheaper parts from scratch.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe used to be a deity,\u201d said Jim Cantrell, SpaceX\u2019s first vice president of business development. \u201cBut you know he\u2019s just a business guy. And he wants to cut everything to the bone.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Mr. Musk dug into his companies\u2019 budgets, preferring to cut too much rather than too little and to deal with the fallout later. Under Donald Trump, he is set to apply those tactics to the U.S. government.On a Saturday morning in December 2022, Elon Musk summoned finance executives at Twitter, which he had bought six weeks earlier, to a conference call. Then he drilled into a spreadsheet that contained the social media company\u2019s expenditures.Mr. Musk was angry, three people who were on the call said. Even though Twitter had just shed more than three-quarters of its employees \u2014 leaving it with just over 1,500 workers, down from nearly 8,000 \u2014 the company\u2019s spending still appeared to be out of control, the billionaire told attendees.Over the next six hours, Mr. Musk read out the spreadsheet line by line and asked workers to account for each item. He ordered some items \u2014 such as car services for executives \u2014 to be cut completely. At one point, he confronted an employee who was responsible for a multimillion-dollar contract related to website security and said his electric vehicle company, Tesla, spent far less on the same task. After the employee pushed back, Mr. Musk said she was no longer with Twitter.The meeting was characteristic of the approach that Mr. Musk has taken to cutting costs. Frugal to a fault, the 53-year-old has been intimately involved in hacking down budgets at his companies, including Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter, which he renamed X. Over nearly three decades as a tech entrepreneur, he has honed his penny-pinching by digging into minutiae and cutting as deeply as possible \u2014 often preferring to cut too much rather than too little, according to 17 current and former employees and others with knowledge of Mr. Musk\u2019s strategies.Perhaps most importantly, Mr. Musk has been brutally unsentimental about the cuts, paying little regard to norms and conventions. The tech mogul has been unabashed about slashing costs to the point that corporate processes \u2014 and sometimes even product safety \u2014 break down, philosophizing that he can just fix things later, the people said. And he has been unafraid to offend, stiffing vendors to negotiate better prices and sidestepping traditional suppliers to manufacture cheaper parts from scratch.\u201cHe used to be a deity,\u201d said Jim Cantrell, SpaceX\u2019s first vice president of business development. \u201cBut you know he\u2019s just a business guy. And he wants to cut everything to the bone.\u201dWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16625,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16623"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16623\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16626,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16623\/revisions\/16626"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/16625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}