Tesla has lost another key executive. On July 15, local time, multiple media reported that Troy Jones, Tesla’s vice president of sales in North America, had resigned. He had worked at Tesla for 15 years. The reason has not been made public.
This is already the seventh resignation in Tesla this year. In June alone, three senior executives resigned.
Other companies under Musk are also experiencing a wave of executive departures. At the beginning of this year, xAI merged with X, and currently five executives have resigned.
The most shocking thing is that this month X’s CEO, Linda Yaccarino, known as the “Velvet Hammer” also suddenly resigned. During her two years at X, she has been trying to save the social platform, but with poor results and was questioned by the outside world as a "puppet CEO."
Twelve top executives around Musk have already left, which is obviously unlikely to be a coincidence.
After combing through the alphabet list, it was found that just halfway through 2025, 12 executives have already left Musk. To be more precise, it all happened over a four-month period from March to July.
In other words, in Musk's company, an average of three senior executives leave every month.
Among them, 7 executives have resigned from Tesla, 4 from X (formerly Twitter), and 1 from xAI.
Let’s look at Tesla first.
In April, David Lau, vice president of software engineering, and Mark Westfall, head of energy mechanical engineering, left. They have worked for Tesla for 13 and 10 years respectively.
Among them, David Lau is better known to us. This Chinese executive has visited China many times to supervise the Shanghai/Beijing R&D center and communicate face-to-face with the media.
The reasons for their departures were not disclosed. What is certain is that David Lau joined OpenAI in early July, three months after leaving Tesla. Mark Westfall chose to join a downstream company of Tesla, Redwood Materials, which is mainly engaged in battery recycling and material production.
In May, another key Tesla figure left the company, Vineet Mehta. He has worked at Tesla for nearly 18 years and is Tesla's director of battery architecture. This is the second time the battery team has lost senior executives in a year. Drew Baglino, head of battery and powertrain, also left in April last year.
Mehta left at an untimely time - Tesla must continue to upgrade its battery technology in the near future, including the development of new batteries for the Model S and the special battery design for the Cybertruck. He claimed that the reason for leaving was to rest and spend time with his family.
In June, Tesla's wave of executive resignations attracted attention because three executives resigned one after another.
They are Milan Kovac, vice president of humanoid robots for Optimus Prime, who is also a 10-year veteran of Tesla. Before taking charge of Optimus Prime, he was the director of autonomous driving (Autopilot) software engineering; Jenna Ferrua, director of human resources for Tesla North America, left the company after 7 years of service. He also claimed that he wanted to spend more time with his family.
and Omead Afshar. This person's identity is quite special. He is a powerful figure in Tesla and one of Musk's confidants. He joined Tesla in 2017 and was a member of the CEO Office. He briefly left for a year in 2022, and returned to Tesla in early 2024. He was promoted to the head of sales and manufacturing operations in North America and Europe, reporting directly to Musk.
His direct reports include Troy Jones, Vice President of Sales and Service, North America. Troy was recently revealed to have left Tesla. He is also an "old man" at Tesla and has been with the company for 15 years.
It is not difficult to see that Tesla is indeed experiencing a wave of executive departures. Moreover, these members have worked for Tesla for more than 10 years on average, which is particularly glaring at a time when Tesla is going through a difficult period.
Not only Tesla, Musk’s other company X (formerly Twitter) is also experiencing a clear wave of executive departures.
In March, X Engineering Director Haofei Wang suddenly resigned. This Chinese executive has a background in Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, and is actually regarded internally as the head of engineering and products, and the "coordinator" between Musk and the engineering team. He joined Twitter in 2021. The company was acquired by Musk at the end of the next year and was promoted to engineering director in July 2023.
Also leaving in March was Dave Heinzinger, head of media strategy/communications, who quietly left the company and position after only three months. In May, Brett Weitz, global head of content, talent and brand sales, left the company after two years.
Brett has a close relationship with X CEO Linda Yaccarino. He was hired after Linda became CEO in June 2023. It is one of the key personnel arrangements made by Linda to rebuild and strengthen the platform content and advertising senior team.
By July, X CEO Linda herself simply resigned.
Considering that X’s staff size is much smaller than Tesla’s, this wave of executive departures is also coming in waves.
Another company under Musk, xAI, officially merged with X at the beginning of this year and also lost a general. In July, Uday Ruddarraju switched jobs to OpenAI. He is one of the founding members of xAI and is responsible for infrastructure engineering and is a very key figure.
So the question is, what is the reason for this wave of executive resignations?
Among the 11 senior executives who resigned, only two gave their own reasons. They all said that they left to spend time with their families. Others were either silent or simply expressed their praise for their old club and their expectations for the future.
But this does not mean that the outside world cannot catch clues.
For example, Omead Afshar, one of Musk’s confidants. Forbes, Reuters, CNBC and many other media claimed that Afshar was actually fired due to poor performance. Indeed, data from the European Automobile Manufacturers Association (ACEA) shows that in the European market, Tesla's sales have declined for five consecutive months, with sales in May falling by nearly 28%. At the time of his departure, Afshar was the head of sales and manufacturing operations for North America and Europe.
But taking a closer look at Afshar’s experience at Tesla, outsiders suspect that he is once again taking the blame for Musk.
Why do you say "again"? Afshar first joined Tesla in 2017, when Tesla was preparing to mass produce Model 3, and soon experienced the company's "darkest moment." Afshar is a member of the CEO's office and stays with Musk, even on Thanksgiving and Christmas. This also solidified his close partnership with Musk.
However, in 2022, Tesla's financial department discovered suspicious purchases with high order amounts and ambiguous uses. After that, the company launched an internal investigation. In the end, many employees were laid off, and Afshar was blamed for placing an order for a hard-to-obtain "special glass" and left.
Interestingly, technology media such as Electrek and The Verge followed up, pointing out that this order may be directly related to "building a glass house for Musk", and Afshar is just a person who does the work, and now he has blocked the disaster for Musk.
The whereabouts of Afshar's dismissal seemed to hint at this possibility. He was arranged into SpaceX, another Musk company, and returned to Tesla just one year later, and was promoted to become the head of sales and manufacturing operations in North America and Europe.
Now that Afshar has been fired again, a question is almost bound to be raised: Who should be blamed for Tesla's poor sales?
Tesla's once fast-growing electric vehicle sales began to slow in 2023 and turned negative for the first time last year. However, it wasn’t until Musk completed his political journey from centrism to self-described “dark MAGA” that sales really began to decline. Tesla's global deliveries fell 13% in the first quarter of this year, and Musk admitted that he had "a lot of difficulty" running the company during the Trump administration.
Not to mention the nationwide boycott of Tesla and Musk. When the situation became fierce, participants rushed into Tesla stores to demonstrate violently.
In addition to the decline in the reputation of Musk and Tesla, the only new model that Tesla has actually launched in the past few years is the CyberTruck, which may also be an important reason.
The departure of Troy Jones, vice president of North American sales who reported to Afshar, was also speculated to be due to weak sales and heavy performance pressure.
To put it bluntly, Musk is really out of control, the work pressure is too great, things are too difficult to do, and there is really nothing he can do.
X's executives also suffered from the pressure and chaos brought about by Musk.
This has to talk about Linda Yaccarino, who will become the CEO of X in 2023.
Maybe you still remember the chaos after Musk acquired Twitter at the end of 2022, with drastic layoffs and advertisers fleeing en masse. When Musk revealed that he was looking for a CEO, he once said that he had to find someone "stupid enough to come." Yaccarino became the character.
She has a glorious resume and is a top talent in the advertising industry, leading NBC Universal's advertising revenue of tens of billions of dollars. She also has high ambitions for working at Twitter. After joining the company, she and Musk declared that they would create a "everything application", a universal app that integrates everything.
But her helplessness soon became apparent. For example, Musk suddenly changed the name of Twitter to Her first priority was to recall advertisers, but Musk continued to make outrageous remarks, the security team was cut off, the platform's atmosphere changed drastically, and the controversy became more and more intense, so advertisers were unwilling to go back.
Two months after Yaccarino joined the company, some employees broke the news to the media that she was actually a "puppet CEO." Business Insider quoted a former Twitter executive as saying: "Even if she is doing the right thing, there is a master behind the scenes. So, she can't succeed."
During her two years on the job, people often forgot that X had a CEO. In July, she suddenly announced her resignation as CEO of
Ruben Schreurs, CEO of Ebiquity, an independent media and marketing consulting firm founded in 1997, sarcastically said: Her bold claims of "turning around the company" and "restoring advertiser confidence" are neither true.
According to Business Insider, X's revenue is still significantly lower than before the acquisition, and advertisers have not returned. The industry says the core problem lies with Musk.
No matter what company they are in, executives need a certain amount of space to display their talents, and now around Musk, such space has become increasingly narrow.
Why did the wave of executive departures begin? Musk himself is at least one of the reasons.
Another reason that can be captured is the competition for talent.
David Lau, vice president of software engineering at Tesla, who resigned in April this year, and Uday Ruddarraju, a member of the xAI founding team, also jumped ship to OpenAI. Based on their past experience, there is speculation that this is related to OpenAI's infrastructure construction "Stargate Project."
What should Musk do? More importantly, will Musk do anything?
This is not the first time that executives around Musk have resigned, or there has even been a wave of executive resignations.
Judging from the past, Musk either adopts downplaying tactics, moves quickly to restore external confidence, or lashes out, but he will not mess up his position.
The most brutal wave of executive departures that Musk has experienced occurred in 2018. Over 40 executives covering many key positions such as accounting/finance, HR, engineering, sales, and manufacturing left one after another throughout the year.
Tesla said this was comparable to the wave of departures at large companies and was not surprising, downplaying the seriousness of the wave of departures. Musk began a series of actions: from the "thorough restructuring" in May, layoffs and reorganization in June, to the resignation of the chief accounting officer and HR officials on the same day in September - Musk repeatedly relied on internal promotions and merging reporting lines to put out the fire; he personally spent US$9.85 million to increase his holdings of Tesla stock; he emphasized at the shareholders' meeting that the company's cash flow was no problem, and announced the Model 3 mass production target; synchronizing mass production progress, personally going to the factory to oversee production; calling for "ignoring the media noise" and claiming that "this quarter is the best quarter", etc.
One no, two blows, and three replacements. After Musk's operations, coupled with the subsequent ramp-up of production capacity, Tesla successfully weathered the crisis of executive resignations.
Downplaying it is a very important step. Most of the time, Musk will not talk about the issue of executive resignations if he can. Even if he mentions it, he will make personal boasts and break up peacefully. But there are times when he can't downplay it, and at such times he becomes quite radical.
The most typical example occurred in 2015, when Apple's car-making project "Project Titan" poached people to Tesla. More than 40 people were poached at one time. Musk was naturally unhappy. In an interview, he famously said that Apple is the "Tesla graveyard": "If you don't do well at Tesla, go to Apple."
This is not true.
For example, Doug Field is a key figure in Tesla Model 3 production, and Apple has also poached Tesla's battery engineers, mechanical engineers, and supply chain managers. These areas are where Tesla's core competencies lie, and the professional capabilities and industry influence of these people show that they are not the "fired" or "not good" employees that Musk said.
Musk's more radical attack on departing executives was his personal attack on Yoel Roth.
Roth was the head of Twitter's "Trust & Safety" and was responsible for the formulation and implementation of platform content rules, including hate speech, misleading information, account bans, etc. He was one of the few senior employees who stayed after Musk's acquisition and publicly explained safety policies to advertisers and users.
Musk is also very supportive of him. When Roth's old tweets about Trump caused controversy, he publicly supported him and expressed his trust.
Against the background of Musk's massive layoffs and increasing regulatory pressure, Roth resigned on November 10, 2022; the day before, he and Musk were on the same stage to assure advertisers that the platform would not become a "lawless" place.
After Roth left the company, he wrote a column criticizing Musk, saying that he acted arbitrarily and that his team's warnings were ignored, resulting in compromised platform security.
Although his tone was relatively mild and he emphasized that Musk was not "the villain in the story," it still angered Musk.
Musk's attack was quite extreme, directly and publicly implying that Roth was a pedophile (Musk always seems to imply that others are pedophiles). This resulted in Roth being harassed by a raging wave of Musk fans, being doxxed, threatened, and even given death threats. Later, he even had to hire armed bodyguards, go into hiding for months, and move several times.
At present, among the several executives who have resigned this year, no one has publicly criticized Musk. The possibility of such an extreme incident happening again is low.
Will Musk continue to remain silent and downplay the wave of executive departures, or will he take measures to try to restore outside confidence?
The question may be, what other means does Musk have to restore external confidence?