Tesla's Executive Departures and Promotions

[00:00:02] Wir bei Vertex wissen, dass die Geschwindigkeit des globalen Handels zunimmt, was eine Steuerverwaltung komplexer macht.

[00:00:08] Und Ihre unternehmenseigenen Systeme sind nicht dafür ausgelegt, diese Steuerkomplexität zu bewältigen.

[00:00:14] Hier setzen wir mit unserer Plattform an, die Continuous Compliance ermöglicht.

[00:00:19] So erhalten Sie mehr Transparenz, mehr Genauigkeit und mehr Vertrauen in Ihre Steuerdaten.

[00:00:25] Sie wollen mehr über Continuous Compliance erfahren?

[00:00:27] Dann besuchen Sie vertexinc.com.de

[00:00:56] Willkommen zu Kilowatt, A Podcast über Elektrik Vehicles, Renewable Energy, Autonomous Driving und viel mehr.

[00:01:02] My name is Bodi and I am your host.

[00:01:06] And today's been an interesting day.

[00:01:09] Do you know, can I just be honest with you for a second?

[00:01:13] There's a lot of news coming in. There's a lot of news coming in every single day.

[00:01:20] There's a lot of good, interesting stories.

[00:01:23] Like three weeks ago, I was struggling to fill a 20-minute show.

[00:01:27] And now I'm struggling to reduce the queue down to a reasonable amount.

[00:01:33] Like there's just a lot going on in the EV world.

[00:01:36] And that's great. Don't get me wrong.

[00:01:38] However, putting together a 20-minute show every single day turns out a little bit more difficult than I thought.

[00:01:44] So this is not going to be a 20-minute show.

[00:01:46] This is going to be a much shorter show.

[00:01:48] But very focused on Tesla's executives.

[00:01:52] And more specifically, who's left the company?

[00:01:55] Where are they going?

[00:01:56] If we know where they're going.

[00:01:57] And who's been promoted?

[00:02:00] One of the things that I wanted to do this week by releasing more than one show is being able to spend

[00:02:06] more time on a specific topic.

[00:02:09] And I was actually working today.

[00:02:12] I was working on the RoboTaxi event.

[00:02:15] Because now that we've had a week to kind of digest some of this stuff and hear from the people who were there

[00:02:20] and the journalists and just the people who attended.

[00:02:23] And being able to actually get a better impression of how that event went down.

[00:02:28] I was working on that.

[00:02:30] I kept coming back to all these executive departures at Tesla.

[00:02:36] But before we get into that, I have a couple of items to get to.

[00:02:41] First, we have a new Patreon supporter.

[00:02:43] Now, I am going to likely mess this up.

[00:02:50] Because it's a username, not a name.

[00:02:52] And I don't know if you want me to use your username or your name.

[00:02:56] But it's either FallenNC or FAllenNC.

[00:03:02] I'm guessing it's FallenNC.

[00:03:05] So, FallenNC, thank you very much for going to patreon.com forward slash kilowatt.

[00:03:09] Signing up and becoming a patron.

[00:03:10] I really appreciate it.

[00:03:12] Thank you.

[00:03:12] It was very nice of you to do.

[00:03:14] And it goes a long way to help out the show.

[00:03:18] So, FallenNC, thank you so much for supporting the show.

[00:03:21] Thank you to everybody who supports the show on Patreon and ACAST+.

[00:03:25] All right, let's dive into our main topic, which is Tesla executives who have left the company recently.

[00:03:34] Now, there have been a number of executive departures in 2024.

[00:03:40] Most notably, we had Drew Baglino, who is the chief of battery development.

[00:03:45] We had Rohan Patil, who is the global director of public policy and business development.

[00:03:52] And then we have Rebecca Tanucci, who was the director of charging.

[00:03:57] And if you believe rumors, she was the one that refused to do some of the things that Elon wanted to do.

[00:04:05] And, you know, lay off as many people as Elon wanted her to lay off.

[00:04:09] And so, she ended up getting fired and the supercharger team was also let go.

[00:04:15] Turns out, some of those people were hired back because if you just randomly fire an entire team,

[00:04:22] there are some people who have, you know, who are the only ones that have the experience to run certain software.

[00:04:30] Or, there are certain processes or there are things in the works that, you know,

[00:04:35] it's just kind of bad form to let go an entire team and then try and hire them back.

[00:04:41] But that's what Tesla did.

[00:04:42] Anyway, the supercharger team was moved over.

[00:04:46] Those who were hired back, they were moved over to Tesla Energy and they kind of hung out with the Tesla Energy folks.

[00:04:53] So, yeah, those are the people that left this summer.

[00:04:58] And I tend to not make a big deal when an executive leaves a company.

[00:05:03] It doesn't matter if it's Tesla or whoever.

[00:05:07] These jobs come within a tremendous amount of stress.

[00:05:11] And I'm sure it's not easy to work as, you know, an executive or higher up at any company and then add, you know, Elon into the mix, right?

[00:05:22] Elon is known to be hardcore by his own, you know, how he describes himself sometimes or how he chooses to do things, which I'm sure can be challenging.

[00:05:34] But if I'm being honest, that's not a work environment I would like to work in.

[00:05:39] That sounds absolutely awful.

[00:05:41] And it's not just Tesla.

[00:05:42] You know, I hear I've heard stories about Apple and other companies as well that just kind of this hard driving, hard charging.

[00:05:50] We're a big company, but we're trying to function like a startup, that kind of environment.

[00:05:56] Some people thrive in that.

[00:05:57] I don't think I would thrive in that.

[00:05:59] It has to be honestly exhausting for everybody involved, including the people's families.

[00:06:07] It can't be easy.

[00:06:09] So my point in saying that is don't look too much into why these folks left.

[00:06:14] We don't know why they left.

[00:06:15] And nobody's going to say anything bad about Tesla, especially at this, you know, high level.

[00:06:21] You might get some people at lower levels that when they walk out the door, they air all of their grievances, let's say.

[00:06:28] But these folks aren't going to do that because they want to be hired somewhere else later on in their career.

[00:06:34] And if they walk out of Tesla and they have a bunch of complaints and say a bunch of stuff that may or may not be true, it's going to be harder to get hired somewhere else.

[00:06:45] So Tesla had a number of executives depart right before and a little bit after the WeRobot event.

[00:06:53] And I should say that some of these executives left during the summer and we're just now finding out about it.

[00:06:57] So that's also a little bit of an interesting deal.

[00:07:02] So let's start off.

[00:07:03] We have Nagish Saldi, who was the chief information officer.

[00:07:07] And I think we talked about this recently, but he helped spin up the data centers in Texas and New York.

[00:07:15] And we all know the data centers have, you know, everything to do with AI and full self-driving for Tesla.

[00:07:21] So that's kind of an important position and an important person.

[00:07:24] And he did a ton of other things.

[00:07:26] But those are just the highlights right before he left.

[00:07:29] And then we have Joss Dings, who is the director of public policy.

[00:07:34] And his job was working on autonomous driving regulations.

[00:07:38] He worked on clean vehicle and fuel credits.

[00:07:42] He had a lot to do with making European chargers more accessible.

[00:07:47] And I think most of these people have been there from, you know, like seven to let's say 10 years from what I can gather from the articles and looking at their LinkedIn pages.

[00:07:57] So they've been there for a while.

[00:07:58] And then we have Mark Van Imp, who was the global vehicle automation and safety policy lead.

[00:08:05] This is another like kind of important job if you are doing a cyber cab or robo taxi.

[00:08:11] He worked with regulators on autonomous vehicle legislation and regulation.

[00:08:15] And while he is leaving Tesla, he is sticking around in the X family of properties.

[00:08:22] He's actually moving over to SpaceX as a policy advisor.

[00:08:27] And then we have Daniel Ho, who was a former head of vehicles program.

[00:08:33] Daniel was a product and program manager for all of Tesla's vehicles at some point.

[00:08:38] And maybe not the Model 3, but a lot of them.

[00:08:40] He worked for 12 years at Ford before starting at Tesla in 2013.

[00:08:47] And he worked on the robo taxi program according to his LinkedIn profile.

[00:08:51] And there was a LinkedIn post in there as well.

[00:08:53] He is headed to Waymo as a program director.

[00:08:58] And then we have David Zhang, who, interesting, was a chemical engineer.

[00:09:03] But for Tesla, he actually did some business analysis stuff.

[00:09:07] He was also a program manager for Model S and X, Model Y, Cybertruck.

[00:09:12] His last position, he worked on Roadster and NextGen Vehicle Program.

[00:09:17] So his role touched a lot of, you know, current Tesla products and future Tesla products as well.

[00:09:23] He's actually one of those folks that left in July but didn't update his LinkedIn profile until recently.

[00:09:29] So we've talked about some of the departures.

[00:09:32] Let's talk about some of the promotions within Tesla.

[00:09:36] Ashok Eliswamy was promoted to VP of AI Software.

[00:09:40] He was working as autopilot director.

[00:09:43] He's actually spoken at a lot of Tesla events.

[00:09:47] And I think this is a good pick.

[00:09:49] I mean, I honestly don't.

[00:09:52] My information is limited.

[00:09:54] But I really like him.

[00:09:55] And he has a, he's able to take complicated topics and distill them down for a moron like me to understand him.

[00:10:03] So understand the topics.

[00:10:04] So he's worked with Tesla for 11 years.

[00:10:07] He's now, like I said, VP of AI Software.

[00:10:10] And then next we have Omid Afshar, who is kind of, this is kind of a weird promotion.

[00:10:18] He worked in the Elon Musk's office.

[00:10:21] One of the ways that some of the articles that I read described his position was he was kind of like chief of staff of, you know, the office of the CEO.

[00:10:32] So for Elon.

[00:10:34] He will now transfer into VP of operations in North America and Europe.

[00:10:41] And he'll be in charge of sales and manufacturing.

[00:10:44] Some of the things that I've kind of heard kicked around a little bit here and there is that Elon is putting people in positions that are blindly loyal to him.

[00:10:55] So he's forcing people out and he's putting people in those positions that believe in the cult of Elon, which is the way one article put it.

[00:11:07] Maybe.

[00:11:08] Again, I'm not going to read too much into why people left the company or why certain people are being promoted to different positions.

[00:11:18] I will say from what I've seen of this person, of Omid, he seems to be really smart.

[00:11:26] I don't know if he's qualified to be in that position just because, again, I'm not qualified to be in that position.

[00:11:33] Not what I know.

[00:11:35] But people are using his name as a reason or as a catalyst to say, you know, Elon is stacking the deck with people that are loyal to him or believe in, you know, what he's doing.

[00:11:51] And sure, probably a lot of CEOs do that.

[00:11:55] I wouldn't, again, read too much into this.

[00:11:58] It may be that Elon's making a huge mistake and completely, you know, stacking the deck with sycophants.

[00:12:05] But it's not something I necessarily see.

[00:12:08] Now, I'm going to say that there is a little bit of a – Omid has been in a little bit of hot water, let's say, in the past.

[00:12:22] I don't know if you remember, but a few months ago we talked about someone at Tesla ordering something called special glass for a secret project.

[00:12:32] And nobody knew what that meant.

[00:12:36] So Tesla's finance department, as you should, flagged the purchase as suspicious.

[00:12:42] And an internal investigation was performed.

[00:12:46] And Omid was found to be one of the people responsible for ordering that glass.

[00:12:51] Now, keep in mind, he works in Elon's office, you know, like cheapest staff for Elon's CEO office.

[00:12:59] From what I've read, and I don't know this to be true or not, this is what I read, other people were fired, but he was not.

[00:13:07] And while we don't know what that special glass was for, what the secret project was,

[00:13:13] in Walter Isaacson's book, Elon confirmed that he wanted to build a glass house in Austin.

[00:13:21] And, you know, after Tesla flagged this – Tesla finance flagged this purchase and a bunch of people got fired,

[00:13:29] you know, the house didn't really go anywhere.

[00:13:31] Are those two things related?

[00:13:33] I don't know.

[00:13:34] But those are two things that happened.

[00:13:38] So we'll just keep it at that.

[00:13:40] And I have one more person to talk about.

[00:13:44] Omid was actually supposed to be the last person.

[00:13:47] And right before I recorded this, there was another person who got promoted at Tesla.

[00:13:51] So I'll get to them in just a second.

[00:13:54] But I really want to iterate here that it's important not to look at these promotions or departures with a conspiracy lens.

[00:14:07] You know, in almost every case, you know, if you sat down and talked to these people or the people making these decisions

[00:14:13] and when it comes to promotions, it is – there are probably really good reasons for it.

[00:14:20] Like, do I believe that Elon would put people who are loyal to him in positions of power?

[00:14:26] Absolutely.

[00:14:26] He's done it on the board.

[00:14:28] I absolutely believe that.

[00:14:30] Is Elon going to put people in – let me say it this way.

[00:14:34] Is Elon going to put unqualified people in high positions because they're loyal to him?

[00:14:41] No.

[00:14:41] If he had a choice between two people, maybe even three people who had roughly the same qualifications and could, you know, more or less do as good of a job as the next one

[00:14:55] and there was one that was particularly loyal or one that he liked more than the other two, then yeah, I think he absolutely would.

[00:15:05] But there's – I don't know that there's a lot of people out there who wouldn't think he would do that.

[00:15:12] But just because these people may or may not have a good relationship with Elon does not mean they're not qualified to be in those positions.

[00:15:19] It's really the point I want to make.

[00:15:21] And now that I have said that, let's go ahead and talk about Tesla's final promotion, or at least the one that – the final one I have heard of,

[00:15:29] is Tesla's former director of Optimus and Autopilot Engineering, Milan Kovac.

[00:15:35] He has been promoted to VP of Optimus, and he actually started with the autopilot team and worked his way through the company.

[00:15:44] So that's cool.

[00:15:46] Also, I would like the title, VP of Optimus.

[00:15:50] That sounds pretty bad.

[00:15:52] A.

[00:15:53] So sounds like a good title to have.

[00:15:57] All right.

[00:15:58] That is it for our news.

[00:16:00] I do want to say, once again, thank you to Fallen in Sea.

[00:16:04] Thank you so much for supporting this show on Patreon.

[00:16:07] I really appreciate that.

[00:16:09] And if you have any issues or you have any questions or whatever, please reach out to me.

[00:16:13] It's bodie, B-O-D-I-E, at 918digital.com.

[00:16:17] Like if you need help with your SS feed or whatever, whatever you need, and that goes for anybody, just shoot me an email.

[00:16:27] I'm going to go.

[00:16:28] You are high.

[00:16:29] You can't go.

[00:16:30] But there comes she.

[00:16:31] M-A-M-A.

[00:16:33] Multifunktional.

[00:16:34] Angenehm.

[00:16:35] Mobil.

[00:16:36] Allzeit bereit.

[00:16:37] Deine Mama.

[00:16:38] Mäuschen, steigst du ein?

[00:16:39] High fährt nicht.

[00:16:40] High lässt fahren.

[00:16:41] Kiffen erhöht dein Unfallrisiko.

[00:16:43] Nimm den sicheren Weg.

[00:16:44] Mehr unter highlestfahren.de

[00:16:47] Zeit für Volt.

[00:16:49] Die Liefer-App für Sushi Sessions und Pizza Partys.

[00:16:53] Für Döner Dates und Business Bowls.

[00:16:55] Die App für alles nach deinem Geschmack.

[00:16:58] In Minuten geliefert.

[00:16:59] Volt.

[00:17:00] Jetzt downloaden.

[00:17:01] Dreimal 8 Euro Rabatt.

[00:17:02] Einlösbar bis 31.12.

[00:17:03] Gilt für NeugrundInnen und die ersten drei Lieferbestellungen.

[00:17:06] Nicht mit anderen Rabatten kombinierbar.

[00:17:07] Es gelten die AGB.

[00:17:10] Mel.

[00:17:11] And speaking of people who support the show,

[00:17:14] I actually got to have lunch with Bruce today.

[00:17:17] Bruce W.

[00:17:18] Who is a Patreon supporter.

[00:17:20] And we had a really nice lunch at this restaurant called Seasons 52.

[00:17:24] It's one of my favorite places to go and have lunch.

[00:17:28] Actually, there's a weird story about Seasons 52

[00:17:30] if I could just kind of digress for a little bit.

[00:17:32] I used to work for a video game company that was here in Phoenix

[00:17:35] called Rainbow Studios.

[00:17:37] And we made the pro wrestling games, WWE.

[00:17:41] And then they also made ATV versus MX Unleashed.

[00:17:45] And I didn't do anything really with ATV versus MX.

[00:17:49] I was on the mocap team for the WWE game, motion capture team.

[00:17:57] And we had a meeting with one of the guys from the main studio.

[00:18:03] And it was a meeting about a side project.

[00:18:06] And this guy wanted to meet at Seasons 52.

[00:18:09] And I made so little money at the time that I could barely afford an appetizer at that place.

[00:18:16] And it's not particularly expensive.

[00:18:17] It's not cheap, but it's not particularly expensive.

[00:18:20] So when I was actually able to afford to eat there,

[00:18:23] it really had like – I get good feelings from being able to eat at that restaurant.

[00:18:28] It's a very nice, low-key restaurant, but it's very well decorated.

[00:18:33] It feels nice inside.

[00:18:35] So yeah, I was lucky enough to go to lunch with Bruce and his family,

[00:18:40] his son, his daughter, his daughter-in-law, and his wife.

[00:18:43] And we just had a really nice time.

[00:18:45] And I feel very grateful that I got to experience that.

[00:18:49] And Bruce at the very end gave me this really cool challenge coin.

[00:18:53] It was a really nice time.

[00:18:56] So Bruce, thank you so much for reaching out and telling me you're going to be in the area

[00:19:01] so that could happen.

[00:19:02] It was really nice.

[00:19:03] And you know what?

[00:19:05] Bruce's family, they don't know who I am.

[00:19:08] And they were there.

[00:19:10] And they couldn't have been lovelier to hang out with.

[00:19:14] So thank you to Fallen in Sea.

[00:19:17] And thank you to Bruce and your family.

[00:19:19] I would mention everybody by name, but I'm not sure if everybody wants to be mentioned

[00:19:23] by name, Bruce.

[00:19:23] So, but thank you.

[00:19:25] It was a really nice day.

[00:19:27] I enjoyed it.

[00:19:29] All right, everybody.

[00:19:29] That is it for me today.

[00:19:32] I'm not sure if I'll be releasing anything on the weekend.

[00:19:34] If I do, it'll be short, less than 10 minutes.

[00:19:37] I really do want to get through this queue.

[00:19:40] And I've been working a lot on this WeRobot follow-up.

[00:19:47] And, you know, there's just a lot to go through.

[00:19:51] I think there was like 21 articles that I had just for the WeRobot episode that I was

[00:19:57] going to do today.

[00:19:59] So I'm probably through 10 of them, maybe nine of them.

[00:20:03] And yeah, there's just a lot of information to sift through.

[00:20:06] So that will probably come out next week.

[00:20:10] And then we also have Tesla's earnings call coming out and a bunch of other companies'

[00:20:15] earnings calls.

[00:20:15] So it's going to get crazy for sure over the next couple of weeks.

[00:20:19] I promise I won't do a show every single day until every piece of news is covered.

[00:20:25] But I'm challenging myself.

[00:20:27] And, you know, hopefully you like listening to these shows.

[00:20:31] If you don't, that's okay.

[00:20:33] You can feel free to skip them.

[00:20:35] Don't skip the Tuesday and Friday episodes, but feel free to skip all the ones that you're

[00:20:39] not finding interesting.

[00:20:40] And yeah, that's it.

[00:20:42] All right, everybody.

[00:20:44] Thank you.

[00:20:47] Again, just to share a little bit of my gratitude with you, I feel extremely blessed to be able

[00:20:52] to do this.

[00:20:53] I feel extremely blessed to be able to meet.

[00:20:56] And Bruce isn't the first person I've met with.

[00:20:58] I've met with tons of people throughout the years.

[00:21:00] I don't always mention it.

[00:21:01] But I've had the opportunity to meet with quite a few, not tons, quite a few people over

[00:21:06] the last couple of years.

[00:21:07] And it's always great to see you, to interact with you.

[00:21:11] I was chatting with somebody on Facebook today, Facebook Messenger.

[00:21:17] And I've chatted with Facebook Messenger, actually.

[00:21:20] I was pretty dormant for me for a couple of years.

[00:21:23] And all of a sudden, it's just kicked up.

[00:21:26] So I love talking to you through email or Messenger or whatever else is out there.

[00:21:33] So you can email me.

[00:21:35] It's Bodie, B-O-D-I-E, at 918digital.

[00:21:38] You can find me on Twitter.

[00:21:40] It's 918digital.com.

[00:21:41] You can find me on Twitter at 918digital.

[00:21:44] I do have a Facebook page with Kilowatt if you want to message me there.

[00:21:49] Like I said, quite a few people have messaged me there recently, which is great.

[00:21:53] But yeah, I hope you all have a wonderful weekend.

[00:21:56] And I will talk to you for sure on Monday.

[00:22:00] But also maybe tomorrow and Sunday.

[00:22:02] We'll see.

[00:22:46] It's not a big day.

[00:22:50] I'm not a big day.

[00:22:52] You're high.

[00:22:53] You can't drive.

[00:22:54] But there comes he.

[00:22:55] B-U-S.

[00:22:57] Bequem.

[00:22:58] Unkompliziert.

[00:22:58] Sexy.

[00:22:59] The Bus.

[00:23:00] Steak on.

[00:23:01] Nice.

[00:23:02] High fährt nicht.

[00:23:03] High lässt fahren.

[00:23:04] Kiffen erhöht dein Unfallrisiko.

[00:23:06] Nimm den sicheren Weg.

[00:23:07] Mehr unter highlässtfahren.de