Tesla loses engineering exec behind energy products

Tesla has lost its director in charge of mechanical engineering for its energy products:  Supercharger, Powerwall, and Megapack.

There has been an ongoing exodus of talent at Tesla since a massive round of layoffs in 2024.

It appears to have accelerated in the last few months amid growing concerns within the company about CEO Elon Musk.

In the last few months, Tesla lost its head of Autopilot hardware engineering, two of its top car designers, its head of the Indian market, its top software engineer, and the technical program lead for its Cortex supercomputer.

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Now, there’s another one to add to the list.

Mark Westfall, a 10-year veteran of Tesla, announced that he had left the company.

Westfall joined Tesla’s engineering team in 2014. In the last few years, he has focused on Tesla’s energy products.

According to his LinkedIn profile, he was promoted to “Head of Mechanical Engineering, Tesla Energy” last year. He led a team of over 50 engineers on Supercharger, Powerwall, and Megapack

The engineer announced that he left Tesla last month:

After 10 years, yesterday marked my last day at Tesla. It’s hard to put into words what Tesla has meant to me – I never imagined the places this job would take me, or the impact I would be able to have. I’m truly proud of the work I’ve done over the years, launching three generations of Supercharger, transitioning the industry to NACS, ramping Powerwall 3, and helping develop the safest and most cutting edge grid scale batteries in the world.

This week, he confirmed that he joined Redwood Materials as ‘Director of Engineering’.

Redwood Materials is becoming a refuge for former Tesla executives.

The company’s CTO is Colin Campbell, a 16-year veteran of Tesla. Redwood’s Chief Commercial Officier is Cal Lankton, Tesla’s former VP of Energy. Chris Lister, the early head of Tesla’s Gigafactory operations, is now the Chief Operations Officer at Redwood.

And of course, JB Straubel, a Tesla co-founder and long-time CTO, founded and is CEO of Redwood Materials.

Redwood has a direct relationship with Tesla as the automaker sells scraps from its manufacturing operations to Redwood for recycling.

Also, while Straubel doesn’t have an executive role at Tesla anymore, he sits on the company’s board.