The future of Tesla Supercharging is uncertain following CEO Elon Musk’s disbanding of the Supercharging team as part of a broader restructuring. The roughly 500 layoffs included senior director of EV charging Rebecca Tinucci and Daniel Ho, director of vehicle programs.

Musk’s abrupt decision has raised concerns about the future of Tesla’s EV charging system, which has grown to be one of the largest EV charging networks in the world, with more than 55,000 charging ports, according to the company.

“I would describe the Supercharger network as one of the crown jewels of Tesla,” said Andres Pinter, co-CEO of Bullet EV Charging Solutions. “Instead of doing victory laps and building the Supercharger network and reaping the benefits of this asset, suddenly there’s this pause.”

Bloomberg reported on Monday that Tesla has started hiring back some of the laid-off employees in the group, citing people familiar with the matter.

It’s been a difficult stretch for Tesla, as the EV maker grapples with market pressures and heightened competition in the sector.

Tesla formed a partnership with Ford Motor, General Motors and others last year, opening up some of the Supercharging network to non-Tesla drivers.

Musk said in a post that Tesla still plans to grow the Supercharger network, just at a slower pace. He also said it will invest $500 million in a network expansion and create thousands of new chargers this year. Still, experts question how the recent cuts will affect the overall EV charging landscape.

“We have really relied on Tesla’s leadership here in North America,” said Matt Teske, the founder and CEO of Chargeway. “I think to all of a sudden have the sensation of that leadership seemingly paused or stopped or halted, it brings into question, where do we go from here and who will step up?”

As Tesla navigates its next steps, stakeholders and EV buyers are waiting to see how the decision will affect not just the charging landscape but also the broader adoption of electric cars.

Watch the video for the full story and to learn how the cuts might shape the future of electric car charging and possibly impact Tesla’s position in the market. Tesla didn’t respond to a request for a comment.

Adam Selipsky, CEO of Amazon‘s cloud computing business, will step down from his role next month, the company announced Tuesday.

Matt Garman, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Amazon Web Services, will succeed Selipsky after he exits the company on June 3, Amazon said.

In a memo to employees, Selipsky said he was leaving AWS after about 14 years to spend more time with his family, and said “the future is bright” for the juggernaut cloud business.

“Given the state of the business and the leadership team, now is an appropriate moment for me to make this transition, and to take the opportunity to spend more time with family for a while, recharge a bit, and create some mental free space to reflect and consider the possibilities,” Selipsky wrote.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a separate memo that Selipsky has “deftly led the business” and said Garman, an 18-year veteran of the company, has “an unusually strong set of skills and experiences for his new role.”

In 2021, after Amazon announced that Jassy would take the helm from Jeff Bezos as Amazon’s CEO, many people speculated that it was Garman who would replace Jassy as the head of AWS. Instead, Amazon tapped Selipsky, then the CEO of Salesforce-owned data visualization software maker Tableau, for the role.

During Selipsky’s three years as CEO, AWS has confronted numerous challenges with its business, including a marked deceleration in revenue growth as rising interest rates caused companies to trim their cloud spend. Since last year, AWS has undergone at least two rounds of layoffs as part of broader cuts at the company that resulted in more than 27,000 employees being let go.

At the same time, it has had to respond to a surge in demand for generative artificial intelligence services, spurred largely by Microsoft-backed OpenAI. Under Selipsky, Amazon invested $4 billion Anthropic, a startup established by former OpenAI employees. As part of the arrangement, Anthropic agreed to designate AWS as its “primary” cloud provider and use AWS’ custom-built AI chips.

Its dominant cloud position has also been threatened by Microsoft’s fast-growing Azure cloud business. When Selipsky took over for Jassy in 2021, analysts estimated that Azure was about 61% of AWS. Now, it’s approaching 77%. Microsoft invested billions in OpenAI and its Azure cloud supplies the startup with computing resources.

AWS is still the cloud leader, and it remains one of Amazon’s most profitable business units. It generated $9.42 billion in operating income, or about 62% of Amazon’s total, in the most recent quarter.

Selipsky’s compensation for 2022 was $41.1 million, with $40.7 million generated in stock awards, according to a securities filing. He didn’t receive stock grants this year.

For Jassy, it marks the latest high-profile exec exit.. Amazon’s devices chief Dave Limp left the company last August to join Bezos’ rocket venture Blue Origin. Chris Vonderhaar, an AWS VP, announced his departure last May, while executives overseeing Amazon’s Alexa and hardware research and development groups retired in October 2022.

— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.

Shares of Alibaba dropped after the Chinese giant’s net profit plunged in the fiscal fourth quarter ended in March.

Here’s how Alibaba did in the March quarter versus LSEG consensus estimates:

• Revenue: 221.9 billion Chinese yuan ($30.7 billion) versus 219.66 billion yuan expected.

Net income attributable to ordinary shareholders came in at 3.3 billion yuan, down 86% year-on-year.

Shares of Alibaba were around 5% lower in premarket trading in the U.S.

Alibaba had a rocky year in 2023, when it carried out its largest-ever corporate structure overhaul. It also separately implemented several high-profile management changes, with company veteran Eddie Wu taking over the reins as chief executive in September.

in a bid to signal confidence to shareholders, the Chinese tech giant said earlier this year that it increased its share buyback program by $25 billion through the end of March 2027.

Alibaba has been grappling with cautious consumer spending in China, but saw signs of a slight recovery in its core e-commerce business in the March quarter.

The Hangzhou-headquartered company has been ramping up its overseas push amid a domestic slowdown, where Alibaba has faced rising competition from low-cost players like PDD.

Revenue for the Taobao and Tmall division, which houses Alibaba’s China e-commerce business, rose 4% year-on-year to 93.2 billion yuan. That was faster than the 2% growth in the previous quarter.

Customer management revenue — which are sales received from services such as marketing that Alibaba sells to merchants on its Taobao and Tmall e-commerce platforms — rose 5% year-on-year, after coming in flat in the previous quarter. Alibaba’s international commerce business also logged a revenue increase of 45% year-on-year to 27.4 billion yuan.

Earlier this year, CEO Wu vowed to “reignite” growth in the e-commerce firm with further investments. There appear to be early signs of that taking hold in the March quarter.

“This quarter’s results demonstrate that our strategies are working and we are returning to growth,” Wu said in the earnings release.

The profit drop casts a long shadow on the earnings. Alibaba said the reason for the fall is “primarily attributable to a net loss from our investments in publicly-traded companies during the quarter, compared to a net gain in the same quarter last year, due to the mark-to-market changes.”

Investors are laser focused on Alibaba’s cloud computing division, which has struggled to reignite growth. The company was planning to spin off the cloud unit, but scrapped plans for an initial public offering last year.

Alibaba said its cloud computing unit brought it a revenue of 25.6 billion yuan, up just 3% year-on-year and marking the same growth rate seen in the previous quarter. 

The Chinese giant said it is in the process of reducing “low-margin project-based” contracts in its cloud division and expects AI-related products and public cloud, which relates to enterprise customers, to “offset the impact of the roll-off of project-based revenues.”

During the March quarter, AI-related revenue experienced “triple-digit growth year-over-year.”

“AI-related revenue was generated from various sectors including foundational model companies, internet companies, as well as customers from industries such as financial services and automotive,” Alibaba said.