Elon Musk has reportedly fired Omead Afshar, Tesla’s head of producing and operations in North America and Europe, in response to Forbes. Each CNBCÂ and Bloomberg corroborated the report. Afshar’s exit follows Milan Kovac, the top of engineering on Tesla’s Optimus robotic, who left the corporate in early June.
Afshar was promoted to the position final yr, Bloomberg experiences, after working for a number of completely different Musk-owned firms since 2017. The timing of his exit is not notably shocking given the difficulty Tesla has confronted promoting automobiles. Gross sales in Europe have shrunk for a fifth consecutive month and the European Car Producers’ Affiliation reports that registrations of latest Teslas dropped by almost 41 p.c in Could. The corporate can also be struggling in China, the place gross sales fell 15 p.c in the identical month.
Whereas Musk seems to be holding Afshar accountable, the blame clearly lies at Musk’s ft. Serving to to fund President Donald Trump’s re-election within the US, working the damaging DOGE cost-cutting efforts after his election and simply typically sustaining a noxious public presence have completely tainted Musk and his firms. Whereas SpaceX nonetheless advantages from authorities contracts, Tesla’s gross sales are weak to public opinion, one thing the Tesla Takedown motion has been leveraging to its benefit with protests exterior of the corporate’s dealerships.
Firing Afshar, leaving his place within the US authorities and launching Tesla’s robotaxi service in Austin are all completely different makes an attempt from Musk to alter the narrative round Tesla. It isn’t clear but whether or not they’ll really assist.
