Tesla opened two gigafactories earlier this year in Texas and Germany, but now CEO Elon Musk is saying that they are “losing billions of dollars.”

                By                    Yaёl Bizouati-Kennedy

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“Both Berlin and Austin factories are gigantic money furnaces right now,” the chief executive officer said in a multi-part video interview with Tesla Owners of Silicon Valley. The interview was filmed in May and released June 22.  

“Berlin and Austin are losing billions of dollars right now because there’s a ton of expense and hardly any output. Getting Berlin and Austin functional and getting Shanghai back in the saddle fully are overwhelmingly our concerns. Everything else is a very small thing basically,” he said in the video.

The June 22 video release comes on the heels of Musks’s clarification earlier in the week about the electric vehicle company’s planned layoffs.

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“We grew very fast on the salaried side,” Musk said at the Qatar Economic Forum, according to Bloomberg. “A year from now, I think our headcount will be higher in salaried and hourly workers, but for now the reduction will be 3% to 3.5%.”

In an internal email to Tesla execs earlier this month, Musk said he had a “super bad feeling” about the economy. At the time he wrote, “Tesla will be reducing salaried headcount by 10% as we have become overstaffed in many areas. Note, this does not apply to anyone actually building cars, battery packs or installing sloe. Hourly headcount will increase.”

Tesla opened its Gigafactory Berlin on March 22 after months of delay, in a move that some analysts said at the time would remove “a major overhang on the stock over the past few months.”

Shares of Tesla are down about 33% year-to-date and were up 4.77% in pre-market trading on June 24.

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