Tesla CEO Elon Musk has fired Omead Afshar, the automaker’s vice president of manufacturing and operations, CNBC has confirmed, following declines in car sales in key markets this year.

Afshar, who reported directly to Musk, led a team of more than a half-dozen high level employees, according to internal organizational charts viewed by CNBC.

Forbes first reported that Afshar was dismissed by Musk. Bloomberg reported earlier that Afshar had left the company.

Executives on Afshar’s team included Troy Jones, who is Tesla’s vice president of North American sales, and Joe Ward, vice president of the Europe, Middle East and Africa region. Also on his team was Karen Steakley, who now leads business development and policy for Tesla, and previously held the role of deputy director for legislative affairs for Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott.

CNBC reached out to Afshar and to other Tesla executives as well as board members. They didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Afshar was the subject of an internal investigation at Tesla in 2022, Bloomberg reported, which had focused on his orders of hard-to-get construction materials, including a special kind of glass for a secretive project for Musk.

Following that probe, Afshar also worked for SpaceX, Musk’s aerospace and defense contractor, but had returned to Tesla and was promoted to the vice president role.

Afshar’s termination follows the resignation of Milan Kovac, previously head of Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robotics program, earlier this month. Kovac said in a post on X that he was leaving in order to spend more time with his family. Musk has thanked Kovac publicly for his work.

Tesla’s stock price is down 19% this year, badly underperforming the Nasdaq and most of its megacap tech peers.

Tesla new car sales in Europe fell for a fifth straight month in May, according to data published on Wednesday from the European Automobile Manufacturers Association, or ACEA, as customers pivot to cheaper Chinese electric vehicles.

The company has faced brand and reputational damage in the past year, largely due to Musk‘s incendiary rhetoric and political activity. Musk spent nearly $300 million to help elect U.S. President Donald Trump to a second term and then led an initiative to slash federal agencies and their resources.

Musk also formally endorsed and promoted Germany’s far-right, anti-immigrant AfD party.

WATCH: No bad news is great news for Tesla on robotaxi debut

Stablecoin issuer Circle resumed its rally on Thursday after a brief pullback this week.

Shares were last higher by 12%, after losing about 15% earlier over the past three days amid heightened post-IPO volatility and as investors weigh speculation around crypto regulation and the upcoming Fed rate decision.

With Circle still hot off its IPO, its investors may have rotated into Coinbase, which gained 15% in the same two days Circle fell. Coinbase, which began as a crypto exchange operator but has expanded its suite of crypto services, also received a batch of price target increases this week from Wall Street including from Bernstein and Oppenheimer.

Coinbase gained more than 5% Thursday.

Coinbase is the main distribution platform for USDC, the popular stablecoin issued by Circle. It receives half of the revenue generated from the interest earned on Circle’s USDC reserves. It also makes 100% of the interest on any USDC held directly on its own platform.

As awareness of Circle’s story grows, investors are beginning to see how Coinbase could benefit from opportunities in the stablecoin space.

Shares of Circle have rocketed more than 600% since its initial public offering on June 5. Meanwhile, Coinbase is on pace for a 50% monthly gain, its best month since November and its first three-month rally since the end of 2023. Shares added more than 2% on Thursday.

Investors this week were watching Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, who was on Capitol Hill for his semiannual testimony to Congress. Powell is facing increasing pressure both from President Donald Trump and multiple White House officials to lower interest rates, as well as two key Fed officials who have said they will likely favor a rate cut as soon as July – which could dampen Circle’s earnings. The company earns interest income on the reserves backing USDC, which are primarily held in cash at banks and short-term U.S. Treasury securities.

They’re also watching progress on the GENIUS (short for Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins) Act, which seeks to establish a regulatory framework for the use of stablecoins. The bill passed the Senate last week and now heads to the House of Representatives. The House has its own stablecoin legislation in the works, called the STABLE Act.

Salesforce is accelerating its use of artificial intelligence in automating workloads, according to CEO Marc Benioff.

“All of us have to get our head around this idea that AI could do things, that before, we were doing, and we can move on to do higher value work,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang, noting that the technology currently accounts for about 30% to 50% of the company’s work.

Technology companies are hunting for new ways to trim costs, boost efficiencies and transform their workforce with the help of AI.

The aftershocks have already hit the tech industry, with the software giant cutting over 1,000 positions earlier this year as it restructured around AI.

Other technology companies have made similar moves, including cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike.

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said the company has shrunk its headcount by 40% due in part to AI investment, while Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the e-commerce giant will use AI to reduce roles.

Benioff called the rise of AI in the workforce a “digital labor revolution,” estimating that the software company has reached about 93% accuracy with the technology.

“It’s pretty good,” he said, but it’s not “realistic” to hit 100%. He added that other vendors are at “much lower levels because they don’t have as much data and metadata” to build higher accuracy.

WATCH: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff: Data centers and chips are ‘commodities’