Elon Musk reportedly fired a key Tesla executive following another month of flagging sales

Elon Musk has reportedly fired Omead Afshar, Tesla’s head of producing and operations in North America and Europe, according to Forbes. Each CNBC and Bloomberg corroborated the report. Afshar’s exit follows Milan Kovac, the pinnacle of engineering on Tesla’s Optimus robotic, who left the company in early June.

Afshar was promoted to the function final yr, Bloomberg reports, after working for a number of completely different Musk-owned corporations since 2017. The timing of his exit is not significantly stunning given the difficulty Tesla has confronted promoting automobiles. Gross sales in Europe have shrunk for a fifth consecutive month and the European Vehicle Producers’ Affiliation reports that registrations of new Teslas dropped by practically 41 p.c in Might. The corporate can be struggling in China, where sales fell 15 percent in the identical month.

Whereas Musk seems to be holding Afshar accountable, the blame clearly lies at Musk’s ft. Helping to fund President Donald Trump’s re-election within the US, working the damaging DOGE cost-cutting efforts after his election and simply usually sustaining a noxious public presence have completely tainted Musk and his corporations. Whereas SpaceX nonetheless benefits from government contracts, Tesla’s gross sales are susceptible to public opinion, one thing the Tesla Takedown movement has been leveraging to its benefit with protests outdoors of the corporate’s dealerships.

Firing Afshar, leaving his position within the US authorities and launching Tesla’s robotaxi service in Austin are all completely different makes an attempt from Musk to alter the narrative round Tesla. It is not clear but whether or not they’ll really assist.