Rivian Layoffs: CEO Praises Chinese EV While Firing Hundreds

Rivian's CEO Tore Down a Chinese EV. What He Found Should Terrify Every American Automaker.

So, Rivian’s CEO, RJ Scaringe, got his guys to tear apart a Xiaomi SU7, the Chinese EV sedan that’s apparently selling like hotcakes for a measly $30,000. He wanted to find the secret sauce. The magic trick. The little gremlin inside that makes it so cheap and, by all accounts, so damn good.

You can just picture it, can't you? A sterile workshop somewhere in California, engineers in clean-room suits huddled around the dissected metallic corpse of their new rival. They’re searching for some alien technology, some unbelievable cost-cutting measure that explains everything.

And what did they find? Scaringe’s big reveal is… nothing.

"There's nothing we learned from the teardown," he says. His conclusion, after all that effort? China has low labor costs and their government throws money at EV companies. Stop the presses. This is like tearing down a slice of New York pizza and discovering the secret ingredient is… cheese. Give me a break.

He’s acting like he’s pulling back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz, telling us not to be mystified. "Everything could be analyzed and calculated," he says. Offcourse it can. But what he’s really saying, when you translate it from CEO-speak, is: "We can’t compete on a level playing field, and it’s not our fault." It’s a beautifully crafted excuse, a preemptive white flag disguised as a profound economic insight.

The 'No Magic' Defense

Scaringe’s whole argument hinges on this idea that China’s success ain’t magic, it’s just math. He talks about how Chinese companies get paid to build plants, with a "cost of capital that is zero or negative." He says that's "just not something that exists in the US."

This is a bad take. No, "bad" doesn't cover it—this is a masterclass in corporate misdirection.

First off, let’s not pretend Rivian is some scrappy startup bootstrapping its way to glory. The Department of Energy just handed them a $6.6 billion loan for their new plant in Georgia. Is that a direct grant? No. Is it a massive government-backed boost that most businesses on planet Earth can only dream of? You bet your ass it is. It’s a bit rich to complain about the other team’s subsidies when you’re cashing a government check with nine zeroes on it.

The real issue here is that Scaringe is trying to frame this as an unsolvable, almost mystical problem. He wants you to believe that Chinese companies operate in a different dimension, governed by physics we can’t comprehend. But what he calls "zero cost of capital" and "low labor costs" is just another way of saying "a coherent national industrial strategy." China decided it wanted to own the EV market, and it executed. They made it cheap to build factories and cheap to hire people to build the cars.

Meanwhile, what have we been doing? Arguing, mostly. It’s honestly exhausting just trying to buy a decent coffee these days without it costing eight bucks, let alone manufacturing a complex vehicle. We’ve optimized our entire economy for quarterly profits and shareholder value, not for long-term industrial dominance. And now that someone else has eaten our lunch, our CEOs are suddenly discovering basic economics and presenting it as a revelation.

The Fear Is Real

Let’s be real. The teardown wasn't about finding a secret. It was about confirming a nightmare. The nightmare is that the Xiaomi SU7 is a "really well executed" and "nicely done" car, as Scaringe himself admits. The nightmare is that there is no single component to copy, no one corner they cut that we can exploit.

The "secret" is the whole damn system.

They found a good car, built efficiently, by a country that is hell-bent on winning this race. And Rivian, with its beautiful but wildly expensive adventure vehicles, has absolutely no answer for a $30,000 sedan that people actually want and can afford. They can’t compete with that. Not now, not ever, with their current model. And Scaringe knows it.

That’s the unspoken terror behind his calm, analytical tone. He's not demystifying China's EV industry; he's articulating his own company's vulnerability. He looked inside the SU7 and saw the future, and it’s a future where Rivian is a niche luxury brand at best, or a historical footnote at worst. Then again, maybe I'm being too cynical. Maybe he's a patriot just trying to warn us.

Yeah, right. He’s a CEO looking at a spreadsheet that doesn’t add up, and he’s telling the world the problem is with the math itself, not his numbers. What a world we live in...

So, The Game Is Rigged?

Get over it. Scaringe’s entire "Wizard of Oz" speech is the biggest cope I’ve seen from a CEO in years. He’s essentially complaining that China is playing the game to win, while American companies have been playing to maximize next quarter's stock price. He found out there’s no magic, just a competitor with more willpower and a better strategy. The real wizard is the guy who convinced American industry that it could fall behind for decades and then just whine its way back to the top. That trick, it seems, has stopped working.