Elon Musk elevates his chief of staff who was in hot water at Tesla amid leadership shake-up

Elon Musk has elevated Omead Afshar, who worked in his office in what many saw as a “chief of staff” position, to a top executive role at Tesla after the young engineer was reportedly in hot water at the automaker.

This appears to be part of a broader leadership shake-up at Tesla.

Afshar has had an interesting career trajectory.

According to his LinkedIn profile, he studied biomedical engineering at UC Irvine and found himself working at medical equipment manufacturer St. Jude Medical from 2011 to 2017.

Then, he did a short 7-month stint as “Manager, High Voltage Operations and Operations Business Systems” at healthcare giant Abbott in Los Angeles before finding himself working in the “office of the CEO” under Elon Musk.

After Musk’s longtime chief of staff (officially the director of the office of the CEO), Sam Teller, left in 2019, Afshar was seen as taking over that role by many people working under Musk at his many companies, but especially Tesla, where Afshar started to lead some projects.

For example, Musk credited Afshar for leading the construction of Gigafactory Texas.

In 2022, Afshar reportedly got in hot water at Tesla.

A report claimed that Afshar was about to be fired from Tesla over a curious controversy where he allegedly placed an order for a “special glass” for a “secret project,” which the automaker’s finance department flagged as suspicious – triggering an internal investigation.

The basis of the investigation was that an employee was using company resources to secure materials for a project that potentially wasn’t related to Tesla.

According to the report, Tesla had already fired employees related to the investigation, and Afshar was going to be next.

The project has been linked to the story that Musk was planning to build himself a glass house near Austin, which was confirmed in his biography by Walter Isaacson, but the project never came to be.

Tesla never disclosed what happened with its internal investigation, but it was later reported that Musk moved Afshar to SpaceX for a while.

Now, he is back at Tesla.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Musk has made Afshar Vice President of operations in North America and Europe, where he will be in charge of sales and manufacturing.

This would make him one of the top execs at Tesla. Tom Zhu, Tesla’s longtime head of operations in China, was given those responsibilities since last year, and had unofficially become Musk’s “number 2” at Tesla, but we reported earlier this year, that Zhu went back to lead operations in China.

Zhu is still one of only three executives listed by Tesla as the top leaders on its website, alongside Musk and CFO Vaibhav Taneja. We wouldn’t be surprised to see Afshar show up there soon.

Afshar’s direct reports reportedly include Troy Jones, a 14-year veteran at Tesla and longtime leader of the North American sales and service operations, and Jason Shawhan, the director of manufacturing for Tesla at Giga Texas. 

Larger Leadership shake-up at Tesla

Tesla has lost a lot of top leadership over the last year. Many were part of a large wave of layoffs earlier this year and others left on their own since.

Electrek tracks hires and departures closely at Tesla, and we haven’t seen a lot of the formers at top levels lately, but that’s not entirely unusual, as Tesla likes to promote within.

Musk does like loyalty, and we now learn that he has promoted some of his top lieutenants at Tesla beyond Afshar.

Ashok Elluswamy, the longtime head of software for Tesla Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD) programs, has been promoted to vice president of Autopilot and AI software. Elluswamy has been at Tesla for a decade and he has been one of the top figures in Tesla’s ADAS programs for the past 5 years.

Milan Kovac, who has also held top roles in Tesla’s autonomous driving programs, has been promoted to Vice President of Optimus, a program that he has been leading for the past two years.

Electrek’s Take

For better or worse, Elon has made clear that self-driving and humanoid robots are the top priorities at Tesla now. Therefore, it makes sense that some of the people leading those programs are now becoming the top executives at the company.

As for Afshar, that’s quite a rise. His new role definitely makes him one of the top execs at Tesla, which is interesting considering he was reportedly in hot water at Tesla just 2 years ago. One might even be forgiven for thinking that Musk could be grooming him to eventually replace him as CEO of Tesla, a role that he previously he didn’t want to hold forever.

Honestly, my main concern with Tesla’s leadership is similar to my concern with Tesla’s board; they are either too close to Elon or too caught up in his cult of personality.

But now that people like Ashok are taking on bigger leadership roles at Tesla, it would be interesting to see if they get a bigger public voice. I’d like to see Ashok, who is working on FSD every day, give us timelines and data on what is happening instead of Elon.