Tesla in crisis: staff losses, AI project closures and increased competition
Tesla has enough problems as it is - falling sales, increasing competition, difficult market conditions. But now a quiet but dangerous crisis has been added to this: a mass exodus of key executives.
What happened
The latest to leave the company was Piero Landolfi, who had been with the company for nearly nine years and was the company's North American service director. In a farewell post on LinkedIn, he described Tesla as "a place where incredible people create incredible products" but admitted it was time for a "new adventure". It was to lead operations at Nimble, an AI robotics and e-commerce automation company. Notably, several former Tesla employees are already working there - it seems the exodus has a specific direction.
Landolfi became the tenth top executive to leave Tesla in 2025. The list includes executives from almost every key area, from sales and HR to chip design and robotics. They include Optimus team head Milan Kovac, vice president of hardware engineering Pete Bannon, and the leader of the AI project Dojo, an ambitious supercomputer for autopilot training.
Dojo was supposed to reduce Tesla's dependence on Nvidia, but in August, Ilon Musk announced its closure, calling it an "evolutionary dead end." The project's closure and staff purges coincided, intensifying talk of an internal crisis.
Tesla was once considered a magnet for talent, but now Musk's brain drain and harsh political statements are undermining the company's appeal - both in the eyes of investors and future employees.
Source: Gizmodo
