TESLA slashed a newly formed marketing team as part of companywide layoffs, reversing course from a traditional advertising push that chief executive officer Elon Musk greenlighted less than a year ago.

The entire US “growth content” team, a group of about 40 employees overseen by senior manager Alex Ingram, was eliminated in the ongoing job cuts, according to sources familiar with the matter. Ingram and Jorge Milburn, who led the global team, were dismissed, the sources said. The company still has a small number of marketing staff in Europe, one source said.

There were also significant layoffs in Tesla’s design studio and staff located in Hawthorne, California, said the sources, who asked not to be identified discussing private information.

In a post on X responding to Bloomberg’s report, Musk wrote of the content team’s work: “The ads were far too generic – could have been any car.”

The cuts mark a pullback from Tesla’s nascent advertising initiatives. The automaker had long eschewed television, radio, print or online ads – and had built a formidable brand largely through word-of-mouth – before Musk said last year that Tesla would “try a little advertising and see how it goes”. Ingram started building the growth team about four months ago.

Investors have increasingly called on Musk to focus more on marketing as global EV sales growth has slowed and more competitors have entered the market. Tesla’s embrace of advertising has also broadly coincided with Musk’s acquisition of the company formerly known as Twitter. The social media platform has sought to stem a sharp decline in ad revenue, driven by major brands’ unease over content moderation and Musk’s own sometimes-controversial posts.

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The upheaval in Tesla’s growth team underscores the broad reach of the company’s largest-ever job cuts, which Musk said last week would affect more than 10 per cent of the global workforce. Bloomberg reported this week that the CEO has pushed for a 20 per cent reduction, which could mean eliminating more than 20,000 jobs.

Tesla’s shares fell 3 per cent at 12.20 pm on Monday (Apr 22) in New York. The stock has tumbled more than 40 per cent this year and is the second-worst performer in the S&P 500 Index. BLOOMBERG