Tesla’s short-lived marketing team has been fired

• Tesla is being advertised just months after it started.
• Tesla has eliminated about 40 marketing and advertising employees, Bloomberg reported.
• The measure is part of the ongoing job cuts that CEO Elon Musk announced last week.

Tesla appears to have pulled the plug on its short-lived marketing team.

According to a report from Bloomberg, the company cut its entire US growth content team during the recent round of layoffs. The team consisted of a group of about 40 people, the release said.

Tesla still has a small group of marketing staff in Europe, a person with knowledge of the matter told Bloomberg.

Elon Musk told employees last week that he would lay off more than 10% of Tesla’s workforce.

Many affected Tesla employees were notified within hours of Musk’s internal email that their roles had been eliminated. The layoff announcements continued late into the week. On Friday, several recruiters at the company received a phone call that their positions had been eliminated, Business Insider previously reported.

For most of its history, the electric vehicle company has survived without any traditional advertising. Instead, it relied on word of mouth and messages from Musk, who promotes his company’s products to his 181.5 million followers on X, formerly known as Twitter.

But that all changed last May when Musk announced at a shareholder event that for the first time he would “try a little advertising and see how it goes.”

Musk, who has said he hates advertising, agreed to the move after Tesla investors called for it, with one arguing that the company should be more like Apple. The company released what appeared to be its very first ad last year.

The growth team, led by senior manager Alex Ingram, only launched for the first time about four months ago, Bloomberg reported.

Tesla’s decision to cut its marketing team comes after Tesla sales collapsed and the company reported lower-than-expected delivery numbers earlier this month.

Tesla will report its latest quarterly results on Tuesday, days after announcing it would cut prices on its vehicles.