Fisker cuts hundreds of jobs in bid to live another day

31 May 2024

Fisker's woes continue. The troubled EV maker has now reportedly cut hundreds more jobs, in a desperate attempt not to go under. The company is continuing its search for funding. If it can't find any, then the alternatives are a buyout (though that fell through once before) or simply bankruptcy, which at this point is always looming.

Workers suspected they would be laid off yesterday when the company directed everyone to work from home, which isn't something it's done very often. And sure enough, the layoffs were then announced during an all-hands meeting held Wednesday morning. It's definitely an interesting strategy to alleviate protests, this - ensuring workers are at home when you fire them.

Fisker founder and CEO Henrik Fisker told employees that this was basically the decision of the large investor the company owes money to, as well as the chief restructuring officer working on the investor's behalf. That investor in question remains mysterious, as Fisker never disclosed who it is. That said, he did reference Heights Capital Management during the meeting - this is an affiliate of financial services giant Susquehanna International Group.

According to an estimate by one current and one laid off employee, only about 150 people are still working for Fisker. Clearly this isn't an amount conducive to continuing to invest and innovate and come up with new models - the company is definitely in a sort of 'conservation phase' waiting to see what the future holds.

Fisker employed 1,135 people as of April 19, so this is a drastic cut - but not the first one, as it has previously cut about 15% of its workforce in February. In the meantime, there were two additional rounds of layoffs - one in late April and another one earlier this month.

Henrik Fisker said during the meeting that the company will continue to sell its Ocean EV to those who want it. The model has seen severe price cuts recently. Fisker also suggested the laid off workers would be re-hired once the company is back up and running, to which we'd say "if".

Most of the laid off people found out through an email they received after having lost access to Microsoft services like Teams and Outlook. They were given one week of severance.

Via