Tesla loses its long-time Chief Information Officer

Tesla is losing its long-time Chief Information Officer, Nagesh Saldi, according to a new report.

He is one of many top Tesla executives who left or have been let go this year.

Back in 2018, Electrek exclusively reported that Tesla let go of its Chief Information Officer (CIO), Gary Clark, as part of a major management restructuring.

At the time, Nagesh Saldi, then VP of system and application engineering, was promoted to CIO, a position he held for 6 years.

Today, Bloomberg reports that Tesla employees were told that Saldi is leaving the company:

Tesla Inc. employees have been told that Chief Information Officer Nagesh Saldi is leaving the company, days before it’s set to unveil robotaxi prototypes at an event in California, according to people familiar with the matter.

Saldi joined Tesla in 2012 from HP, and he has been involved in building a lot of Tesla’s custom software.

The automaker is known not to like to rely on third-party enterprise software, and it has long been developing its own: Tesla One.

More recently, Saldi was an important part of Tesla’s data center effort as it needs more computing power to train its neural nets for self-driving and other AI efforts.

We expect that Tesla will give updates on some of these efforts at its upcoming event next on October 10th.

The report doesn’t mention whether Saldi left on his own or was let go, like many other Tesla employees, as part of several waves of layoffs earlier this year.

Saldi reported directly to CEO Elon Musk, like many executives following a purge of top Tesla executives:

Tesla currently only lists CEO Elon Musk, Tom Zhu, who leads Chinese operations, and CFO Vaibhav Taneja as top executives.