Elon Musk has reportedly fired Omead Afshar, Tesla’s head of producing and operations in North America and Europe, in accordance with Forbes. Each CNBC 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 function final 12 months, Bloomberg reviews, after working for a number of completely different Musk-owned corporations since 2017. The timing of his exit is not notably shocking given the difficulty Tesla has confronted promoting vehicles. Gross sales in Europe have shrunk for a fifth consecutive month and the European Car Producers’ Affiliation reviews that registrations of recent Teslas dropped by practically 41 p.c in Could. The corporate can 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 toes. Serving to to fund President Donald Trump’s re-election within the US, working the harmful DOGE cost-cutting efforts after his election and simply typically sustaining a noxious public presence have completely tainted Musk and his corporations. Whereas SpaceX nonetheless advantages from authorities contracts, Tesla’s gross sales are susceptible to public opinion, one thing the Tesla Takedown motion has been leveraging to its benefit with protests outdoors 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 vary the narrative round Tesla. It isn’t clear but whether or not they’ll truly assist.
