Minutes later, during an all-hands meeting, Cruise employees learned a few more details. The self-driving car company would be absorbed into parent company GM and combined with the automaker’s own efforts to develop driver assistance features — and eventually fully autonomous personal vehicles. Whether their jobs would be safe or cut was, and still is, unclear.
That meeting was short and unsatisfactory, according to one source, who noted that the senior leadership team was also surprised by this turn of events. Whitten, president and chief technology officer Mo Elshenawy, and chief administrative officer Craig Glidden, led the all-hands.