A tipster at Viacom sends us this regarding the company's rumored looming layoffs: "so here's the deal with viacom layoffs - they'll be no bulk layoffs, HR is laying off 3-4 people a day, until supposedly election day to minimize press coverage. sneaky viacom/mtv!" That would be sneaky. They add, "they are currently working on a company wide layoff structure. they've already begun, in a quiet ninja style manner that viacom normally does not do." We're watching you, Viacom. [Anyone with more info can email us]

Elon Musk, the Tesla Motors investor who has freshly installed himself as the electric automaker's CEO, has explained his management coup and the company's pending layoffs in a blog post. Tesla's $47 million engineering center outside Detroit, near the automotive industry's biggest pool of technical brains? Gone. Tesla's much-anticipated Model S sedan? Delayed until the middle of 2011, at best; the company is ceasing all real activity that would lead to a car getting built. The $109,000 Roadsters customers have ordered? "I personally stand behind delivering a product that you will love," writes Musk. Musk has not yet enumerated how many of Tesla's employees will lose their jobs.

The Wall Street Journal snagged a copy of an email sent around the world's fourth-largest enterprise software company. I'm impressed that a firm with 50,000 employees and two CEOs managed to restrict its leaks to the Journal. Here's the raw email reconstructed from the Journal's blog post, which spends too much time framing and excerpting the missive. Notice how the story gets the awful irony out of the way first — SAP is freezing its own IT spending — then spells out a three-pronged plan that never once says "layoff."

There's a thin line between "cheerleader" and "liar." And Cisco CEO John Chambers likes to wave his pom-poms over it. Speaking at a Gartner conference, Chambers said the company wasn't planning any cutbacks, commenter sample032 noticed. On Monday, Cisco filed papers to start a mass layoff of 129 employees in its Richardson, Texas facility. Not technically a lie, a Cisco spokesman maintained to the San Francisco Business Times, because the company "continuously evaluates its businesses to align human and capital resources to address key growth opportunities and improve efficiency." The new euphemism for "layoffs" is "business as usual."

Tuesday afternoon we asked about rumored layoffs at Niche Media, publisher of socialite city magazines. From what we've heard since, it sounds like the bloodletting does, indeed, go well beyond Philadelphia Style and is in fact related to the Wall Street meltdown and advertising recession. "Top management is on it's way to Miami to repeat the same," one tipster writes. "Slash up the staff at Ocean Drive." Another writes, "There were more layoffs on Monday at [DC-based] Capitol File. The senior editor and two sales reps were let go." It should come as little surprise that plummeting real estate values and stock market contraction should sharply curb the number of people who think of themselves as affluent, and who thus read these sorts of magazines, particularly in recently fast-growing cities like Miami and DC. CEO Jason Binn made things worse by expanding to aggressively, one tipster claims:

In our inbox, rumor of a staggering blow to one of Silicon Valley's new growth industries: Tesla Motors, a tipster tells us, is laying off 100 people, about half of its staff. CEO Ze'ev Drori is also leaving, he claims. Update: Tesla VP Darryl Siry called Wednesday morning to tell us that the number our tipster supplied is "exaggerated" and that the company is "refocusing" to get through "a tough nine months." Sad: A few years ago, electric-car enthusiasts talked up the Valley as the new Detroit, home to a vibrant new automotive economy. Last month, Tesla had set plans for a $250 million electric-car factory in San Jose, along with a new headquarters.But autos are an expensive business, thoroughly dependent on free-flowing credit for their manufacture and sale. Tesla's high-end electrics, a status symbol in good times, now seem excessive; who wants to drive a $109,000 car into a half-empty parking lot? Siry says that the company's moves aren't driven by demand, which remains healthy.

Here's a career tip from Ed Sussman, the fired head of Mansueto Digital: Have a startup in your back pocket. Since March, he reveals, he's been working on a side project while running the websites of Fast Company and Inc. magazines for Mansueto Ventures. His job was one of 20 eliminated in the cutbacks, which primarily hit the company's online and events divisions. He tells Mediabistro that he and his partners have "put some 4,000 hours into the project" — an effort to commercialize Drupal, an open-source blog software program. Gosh, do you think his boss would have waited until October to lay off Sussman if he had known how much free time his employee had on his hands?

That long-awaited round of layoffs at MTV and other parts of Sumner Redstone's hip media conglomerate may come as early as today, according to a tipster. Anyone else have news?

Seesmic has laid off 7 employees — a third of its staff. Never heard of Seesmic? You must be doing something right with your life. The startup was ridiculous from its very conception as a tool for embedding videos as comments on blogs. Only to people who spend all day reading and commenting on blogs did that sound like a good idea. But that's exactly the kind of people Loic Le Meur attracted to himself — the groupthinking commentards of Silicon Valley, a self-appointed A-list of the blogosphere. To anyone conducting serious business, Le Meur's bloggy pals were an A-list, all right — "A" as in "avoid." Predictably, Le Meur and his investors — a group which includes Michael Arrington, a frequent promoter of Seesmic on his TechCrunch blog — are spinning the layoffs as a result of the recent economic unpleasantness.Nonsense. Seesmic wasn't just a bad idea; we hear from insiders; it was poorly executed, to boot. The company was in the midst of a top-to-bottom rewrite of its code. In the Seesmic video in which Le Meur announced the layoffs, he alluded to cuts in engineering — people "working behind the scenes" on the product. What that tells me: Le Meur has given up on this horrendous waste of time and effort, and is just biding his time until he can offload it on someone. He has a good track record of doing that; Six Apart, whispers have it, regrets spending the money it paid for Le Meur's Ublog, a French blogging service. Unfortunately for Le Meur, these are less bubbly times. Will the $6 million he raised in Seesmic's last round see it through next year without an acquisition? That's the only way in which Seesmic's fate is connected with the real economy: The suckers who would normally pony up for Le Meur's latest overpuffed adventure are hiding under their desks. Buying Seesmic is just another disaster they can put on their A-for-"avoid"-list.

You'd think times of financial chaos would be helpful, at least in the short term, to law firms. Not always so. Heller Ehrman, a large law partnership which began dissolving last month after failing to find a merger partner, has laid off 100 employees. Heller has had a large presence in the Valley since it bought Venture Law Group after the last bubble burst.

As Wall Street's mistakes continue to spill over into the tech sector, nervous managers are scrambling for proven ways to cut their budgets. Tough times call for old solutions to new problems. But you need to package them as new solutions to old problems. Here's a translation guide to analyst house Gartner's pricey advice — or at least to Gartner's advice as rewritten by a bunch of journalists at ZD:

A longtime reader sent me this classic post-layoff notice in response to our plea for more crowdsourced content. Instead of just telling me a story in text, he gave me a Word document mailed to all employees, so I could screencap it for you. This would've been an awesome post ... in July, when the doc is dated. Yahoo did everyone a favor by including Valleywag in its training video All Hands, the Movie. The lesson? Tipping us isn't about whether or not you get caught. It's about watching how long those idiots in HR take to figure it out.

When the whole Wall Street meltdown thing was first breaking last month, some ad execs waved the whole thing off, saying the market might be a bit "soft" momentarily but that it would surely spring right back into shape. So, how's it looking a month later? Well it's all good, except for how nobody can sell TV ads and ad agencies are laying off hundreds of employees and media sellers are trying to figure out how they can politely start asking for all payments up front. Let's take a brief look at the sunny indicators, shall we?:

Times are tough all over. That's the excuse bosses are now using for cleaning house, making hard decisions they were too timid to execute in bubblier times. We've just heard that Mansueto Ventures, the publisher of Fast Company and Inc. magazines, is laying off 20 people. Inside the company, it's being spun as an "economic move" — but if it's a financially motivated maneuver, why is Fast Company magazine being left untouched in the layoffs?Most of the cuts are hitting Mansueto Digital, the company's Web arm, previously the fiefdom of executive Ed Sussman. Sussman is leaving the company, and control of Fastcompany.com is now being handed to the magazine's editor, Bob Safian; traffic had fallen by about half on Sussman's watch, while rivals like Wired saw visits to their websites grow quickly. Robert Scoble, the self-obsessed managing director of Fastcompany.tv, will still be employed as of Monday, though he now reports to Safian. Darn!

We've got our first layoff-memo story — and it's actually about a layoff conducted without a memo. Read on, and don't forget to send in your own:

Nothing brings out a boss's penchant for doublespeak and obfuscation like a layoff. Take, for example, eBay PR boss Alan Marks's instant-classic "simplification" memo. Cutbacks are sure to continue as companies agonize over just how deep this recession will go; so, too, will the self-contradictory jargon and false logic which only makes bad news worse. Send in the worst layoff memos you've seen, and we'll publish them here.

The last time YHOO traded below $13 was after 9/11 and before the U.S. invaded Iraq. (I live in San Francisco, where even Republicans obsess over these connections.) Henry Blodget, the disgraced stock analyst everyone trusts now, says Yahoo is scrambling to update its layoff plans after watching eBay go first:

You know that scene in Fight Club where Ed Norton beats the crap out of himself to walk away with off-the-books pay severance and free flight vouchers? Those lazy eBay employees didn't even have to go through that much for their sweetheart deal. Yahoos, on the other hand, would count themselves lucky to get the chance. If living in California hasn't made your heart bleed liberal juice yet, read what CaliforniaCajun, today's featured commenter, says:

Alan Marks, eBay's top flack, has a new buzzword for layoffs: "simplification." It's a simplification so simple that Marks had to send a 1,078-word memo explaining it. The bottom line: He cut 15 out of 105 people, or 14 percent of his staff worldwide, but he's hiring another 8 people into new positions. This makes me wonder: Is Marks so immersed in PR-speak that he's lost the ability to compose a blunt and honest communication? Or does Marks, an eBay novice who only joined the company in April from Nike, simply distrust his staff, and thus feel obliged to sanitize all of his internal emails in case they get leaked — as this one has? Read on:

The latest rumor on Yahoo's upcoming cuts: As many as 1,750 jobs lost. But far worse than the number are Yahoo CFO Blake Jorgensen's plans for the departed. A tipster says Jorgensen is pushing for zero severance pay beyond what's legally required in a mass layoff. Compare that to eBay, which sprang for five months in its latest round of cuts. "Corporate politics — such a dirty game and the average Joe gets the shaft," our tipster writes. "Financially, I don't understand this because the market is going to shit and the Street would be forgiving if Yahoo decided to give the rank and file up to six months or so. Not to mention the people at Yahoo right now stuck with management through all the turmoil, although maybe that makes them too stupid to deserve severance in excess of unemployment checks. However once the political motives come into play it makes much more sense." Political motives?Zero severance would certainly evaporate any remaining support CEO Jerry Yang has within the company. But our tipster says Sue Decker, a close friend of Jorgensen's who hired him into the company, opposes his severance plans. So what's Jorgensen's game?