Tesla loses another director – Rohan Ma, energy/autobidder lead

Another Tesla director is leaving the company, amid an exodus of top talent over the last few months.

The director in question this time is Rohan Ma, who was responsible for Tesla’s “Autobidder” software.

Autobidder is a software platform that coordinates energy trading, which works alongside Tesla’s Energy products, like Powerwalls and Megapacks, to sell energy to the grid in real time.

Software like this is what allows grid-tied batteries to buy and sell from the grid, and help the owners of those batteries to make money by arbitraging energy – storing it when it’s cheap and plentiful, and selling it when it’s expensive and demand is high.

Not only does it help make money for battery owners who provide these grid services, but it helps to balance the grid during unstable times of very high demand or when supply is constrained (due to weather, generation plant shutdowns, or the like). It’s also a solution to the oft-repeated “intermittency” problem of solar and wind.

As of 2023, Autobidder made over $330 million in profits for the owners of the then-7GWh battery capacity that was available under its purview. Our last update on Autobidder profits came about a year ago, so surely more has been made since then.

But that update, at the time, came courtesy of Rohan Ma – the very director who announced his retirement from Tesla this week.

He announced his decision in a LinkedIn Post, where he mentioned his pride in contributing to Tesla Energy, thanked his colleagues, and said he has no plans for the future yet:

After eight years at Tesla, this will be my last week. It was a ride of a lifetime!

Today, Tesla Energy is thriving and I can confidently say it’s in the best position it has ever been in to drive impact toward the original mission I signed up for. I’m proud to have contributed over the years to where it is now, and will be cheering the team on from the sidelines as they carry the torch forward and continue to relentlessly solve problems at the frontier of the energy transition.

I want to thank all of my Tesla colleagues, past and present. It was a privilege to work alongside such incredibly resilient, committed and capable people all these years. I’m also grateful to our Autobidder customers, particularly those who partnered with me when it was just an idea on a white board. I always felt grateful for the responsibility of demonstrating what energy storage is truly capable of achieving in electricity markets, and without the trust of our partners and customers, that would never have been possible. Lastly, Drew Baglino, thank you for betting on me and bringing your vision, intellect and relentless optimism to us all over the years.

As for me, I have no plans yet for my next chapter, which is both thrilling and a bit terrifying. I’m looking forward to reconnecting with many of you in the coming months and learning more about what’s going on out there before hunkering down to build again.

The departure follows a string of other high-profile departures from Tesla.

Notably, Drew Baglino, the one person who Ma mentions by name in his departure post, left in April of this year, alongside Tesla’s announcement that it will lay off “more than 10%” of its global workforce. Baglino had been the top engineer at the company and had worked at Tesla for 18 years.

In the last few months Tesla also lost policy head Rohan Patel, Supercharger lead Rebecca Tinucci (and her entire team), program manager for Model S/3/Y Daniel Ho, investor relations head Martin Viecha, ad team leader Alex Ingram (and his entire team), head of product launches Rich Otto, and more, many of which seem connected in some way to Tesla’s massive layoffs. Around a year ago, the company lost CFO Zach Kirkhorn and senior engineer Colim Campbell as well.

While it’s no surprise for there to be turnover at companies, especially one as large as Tesla, the temporal proximity of departures of longtime and influential employees is worth noting. Tesla’s corporate governance page has become more and more sparse over time, with now only a single C-level executive listed on the site (CFO Vaibhav Taneja – as for CEO Elon Musk, he instead refers to himself as “Technoking”).

Electrek’s Take

We’ve mentioned several times the disturbing direction that Tesla is going with its leadership, with many longtime leaders departing or being fired.

It seems to be a pattern – and we believe that the pattern has to do both with Musk intentionally isolating himself at the top, and making himself seem more necessary to the organization (perhaps related to the shareholder compensation vote), and also related to executive reactions to this leadership behavior.

The company’s direction seems to have changed sharply in recent years, with Musk seeming to lose interest in electric cars and environmental protection and instead doubling down on big, likely unreachable promises for the near future. Not to mention his social media distractions.

For longtime employees who led the charge towards sustainable transport – which is Tesla’s mission, after all – this recent lack of focus on the mission must be discouraging. It’s certainly been discouraging to us here at Electrek, as our mission is also to move to more sustainable transport, and we see the change in Tesla’s strategy, as Fred wrote about yesterday in his excellent article about why he divested from Tesla (TSLA).

Most of these executives haven’t said they’re leaving for this reason, but that’s not the kind of thing that leaders usually say publicly when they leave a job. Everyone wants to put on a nice face and not talk bad on their previous employer, which is understandable. But Rich Otto did say that he left due to low morale in May, and that it was “hard to see the long game” in recent leadership decisions.

While Ma didn’t say anything similar in his departure note, the fact that he thanked only one former executive by name – Drew Baglino, who left earlier this year – and not the chief executive who is still the titular head of the company, may suggest there is some latent dissatisfaction with the direction of the company.