BP is looking at the recent layoffs to Tesla’s Supercharger team as an opportunity for growth, as the oil giant is hoping to not only hire some of the former employees, but also some of the sites Tesla has in the pipeline that now have an uncertain future.
Last week Elon Musk fired the entire Supercharger team in the US, with the layoffs extending to the Canadian team a few days later. The abrupt move caused a lot of confusion among property owners and managers who had previously been working with Tesla to install a Supercharger site at their properties.
It also put over 500 workers with a strong resume in building out a charging network on the open market.
Now BP is looking to take advantage of that, with CEO Sujay Sharma saying in a recent interview that former employees and those property owners left stranded should contact him as his company “is aggressively looking to acquire real estate to scale our network.”
“If there are stranded real estate partners who are looking for someone to call, they should feel free to pick up the phone and call me or look me up on LinkedIn,” Sharma told Bloomberg.
In October last year BP announced it was buying $100 million worth of Supercharger equipment from Tesla, the first deal of its kind, to build out its own charging network, BP Pulse.
The company plans to spend $1 billion to build over 3,000 charging stations across the US. About half of that money will be spent in the next two to three years, according to Sharma.
