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Tesla tells some laid-off employees their separation agreements are canceled and new ones are on the way

Elon Musk speaking at an event.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk weighed in on the severance offered to laid-off staff earlier in the week. Antonio Masiello/Getty Images
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Some laid-off Tesla workers received a notification that their separation agreements had been canceled on Thursday and to expect new ones, two laid-off workers told Business Insider.

The workers received a notification about a document titled "Your separation agreement," with "status: canceled," according to one of the emails obtained by BI. The notification said, "Canceled by sender: Cancelling to send updated agreement," per a screenshot of the message. The email appears to be an automatic email from the Adobe Acrobat Sign e-signature tool.

The notification came after Elon Musk sent a companywide email to current Tesla employees on Wednesday, saying that "some severance packages are incorrectly low."

"My apologies for this mistake. It is being corrected immediately," Musk said in the email that was viewed by BI.

Some of the former employees who received the notification had been previously offered two months of severance. The severance packages didn't appear to be weighted based on the length of time workers had been with Tesla, as workers with anywhere from a few months to several years at Tesla received the same number of weeks paid out, five sources who received the offers told BI.

Other workers told BI that as of Thursday afternoon, they were still yet to receive any information about severance packages.

Under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, companies that have more than 100 workers are required to provide 60 days of notice before a large-scale layoff. Violations of the WARN Act can entitle workers to up to 60 days of pay and benefits if they're not given proper advanced notice.

Musk announced that he planned to cut more than 10% of Tesla's workforce on Sunday night. Impacted workers received emails notifying them they'd been terminated within a few hours of Musk's internal announcement.

A spokesperson for Tesla didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Do you work for Tesla or have a tip? Contact gkay@bjinnox.com from a nonwork email and device.

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Grace Kay
Grace Kay was a Correspondent on Business Insider’s enterprise desk, where she covered the inner workings of Tesla, Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, and the broader robotics and electric vehicle industries.Her stories have been cited by multiple publications, including Reuters, Bloomberg, and CNBC. Before joining Business Insider, she worked at Bloomberg and Forbes.Tesla: Inside 'Project Rodeo,' the Tesla effort pushing the limits of self-driving technologyInternal Tesla salary database shows Elon Musk's strategy: Lower salaries, bigger stock grantsTesla tells staff it plans to roll out its Robotaxi service in San Francisco this weekendTesla has been working on modified Model Ys for its Robotaxi programTesla prioritizes Musk's and other 'VIP' drivers' data to train self-driving softwareAshok Elluswamy is the most powerful Tesla executive you've never heard ofxAI:Internal documents reveal how Elon Musk's xAI trains Grok to be the anti-woke chatbotXAI's Macrohard project stalls as Tesla ramps up a similar AI agent effortElon Musk's xAI plans to supply computing power to coding startup CursorWar rooms, group chats, and video games: Inside Elon Musk's AI startupBehind Grok's 'sexy' settings, workers review explicit and disturbing contentElon Musk's xAI lays off hundreds of workers tasked with training GrokEVs and robots:Fisker employees are fixing some customers' cars with parts from the company's vehicle 'graveyard,' sources sayFisker Ocean reservation cancellations top 40,000 as the EV company tries to fight off bankruptcy, leaked data showsInside the downfall of Henrik Fisker's second automotive startup, which just filed for bankruptcyInside the glass-walled Tesla lab where workers train the Optimus robot to act like a humanInside OpenAI's renewed push into robotics