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.
Tesla's 'deep bench strenght' took a bit hit in just a year.
Elon said there were too many people on stage. He meant it. pic.twitter.com/qvAiwBP0F4
— Fred Lambert (@FredericLambert) May 1, 2024
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.
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![Day 1 of the Electrek Formula Sun Grand Prix 2025 [Gallery]](https://i0.wp.com/electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2025/07/54629423281_6315c46dff_k.jpg?resize=1200,628&quality=82&strip=all&ssl=1)
Today was the official start of racing at the Electrek Formula Sun Grand Prix 2025! There was a tremendous energy (and heat) on the ground at NCM Motorsports Park as nearly a dozen teams took to the track. Currently, as of writing, Stanford is ranked #1 in the SOV (Single-Occupant Vehicle) class with 68 registered laps. However, the fastest lap so far belongs to UC Berkeley, which clocked a 4:45 on the 3.15-mile track. That’s an average speed of just under 40 mph on nothing but solar energy. Not bad!
In the MOV (Multi-Occupant Vehicle) class, Polytechnique Montréal is narrowly ahead of Appalachian State by just 4 laps. At last year’s formula sun race, Polytechnique Montréal took first place overall in this class, and the team hopes to repeat that success. It’s still too early for prediction though, and anything can happen between now and the final day of racing on Saturday.
Congrats to the teams that made it on track today. We look forward to seeing even more out there tomorrow. In the meantime, here are some shots from today via the event’s wonderful photographer Cora Kennedy.
Stay tuned for more!
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The numbers are in and they are all bad for Tesla fans – the company sold just 5,000 Cybertruck models in Q4 of 2025, and built some 30% more “other” vehicles than it delivered. It just gets worse and worse, on today’s tension-building episode of Quick Charge!
We’ve also got day 1 coverage of the 2025 Electrek Formula Sun Grand Prix, reports that the Tesla Optimus program is in chaos after its chief engineer jumps ship, and a look ahead at the fresh new Hyundai IONIQ 2 set to bow early next year, thanks to some battery specs from the Kia EV2.
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Tesla has launched its new Oasis Supercharger, the long-promised EV charging station of the future, with a solar farm and off-grid batteries.
Early in the deployment of the Supercharger network, Tesla promised to add solar arrays and batteries to the Supercharger stations, and CEO Elon Musk even said that most stations would be able to operate off-grid.
While Tesla did add solar and batteries to a few stations, the vast majority of them don’t have their own power system or have only minimal solar canopies.
Back in 2016, I asked Musk about this, and he said that it would now happen as Tesla had the “pieces now in place” with Supercharger V3, Powerpack V2, and SolarCity:
All of these pieces have been in place for years, and Tesla has now discontinued the Powerpack in favor of the Megapack. The Supercharger network is also transitioning to V4 stations.
Yet, solar and battery deployment haven’t accelerated much in the decade since Musk made that comment, but it is finally happening.
Last year, Tesla announced a new project called ‘Oasis’, which consists of a new model Supercharger station with a solar farm and battery storage enabling off-grid operations in Lost Hills, California.
Tesla has now unveiled the project and turned on most of the Supercharger stalls:
The project consists of 168 chargers, with half of them currently operational, making it one of the largest Supercharger stations in the world. However, that’s not even the most notable aspect of it.
The station is equipped with 11 MW of ground-mounted solar panels and canopies, spanning 30 acres of land, and 10 Tesla Megapacks with a total energy storage capacity of 39 MWh.
It can be operated off-grid, which is the case right now, according to Tesla.
With off-grid operations, Tesla was about to bring 84 stalls online just in time for the Fourth of July travel weekend. The rest of the stalls and a lounge are going to open later this year.
Electrek’s Take
This is awesome. A bit late, but awesome. This is what charging stations should be like: fully powered by renewable energy.
Unfortunately, it will be much harder to open those stations in the future due to legislation that Trump and the Republican Party have just passed, which removes incentives for solar and energy storage, adds taxes on them, and removes incentives to build batteries – all things that have helped Tesla considerably over the last few years.
The US is likely going to have a few tough years for EV adoption and renewable energy deployment.
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