Xos

How it happened

Xos is an electric commercial-truck maker that went public via SPAC in 2021 at a valuation of about $2B. Production challenges, weak demand and ongoing losses sent shares plunging, cutting its market cap to under $0.1B and erasing its unicorn status. Employee reviews from the slide describe how the belt-tightening felt inside: layoff rounds arriving so regularly that one 2023 reviewer tallied a seventh, priorities and org charts reshuffled every few months, and raises promised but repeatedly deferred as budgets shrank — even as many reviewers kept vouching for the trucks and the mission.

Employee accounts paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗. See our methodology.