Restructures the leadership of the manufacturer’s artificial intelligence projects
MADRID, 17 Oct. (EUROPA PRESS) –
Tesla founder Elon Musk has named Omead Afshar as supervisor of the automaker’s manufacturing and sales strategy for Europe and North America.
Specifically, Afshar has until now been one of the South African tycoon’s trusted men within the electric vehicle manufacturer, according to information from Bloomberg and ‘The Wall Street Journal’.
Afshar has a degree in biochemical engineering from UC Irvine and worked at medical equipment manufacturer St. Jude Medical between 2011 and 2017 before becoming manager of high voltage operations and business operations systems at pharmaceutical company Abbott in Los Angeles before to go to work for Elon Musk.
Company sources consulted by Europa Press have declined to comment on the matter.
With a meteoric career within Tesla that led him to be in the pools to succeed Sam Teller, Elon Musk’s chief of staff in 2019, in 2022 Afshar was on the verge of being fired from the manufacturer due to a controversy aroused after it was discovered that he carried out, allegedly 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 the employee was using company resources to obtain materials for a project that was potentially unrelated to Tesla. In this case, there was speculation that the glass ordered would go to the construction of a glass building adjacent to the Texas factory.
At the end of the investigation, Tesla never revealed its conclusions, although it was soon learned that Afshar was transferred to SpaceX for a few years.
BROADER RESTRUCTURING
At the same time, Musk has restructured part of the company’s leadership, as ‘The Wall Street Journal’ reported a few hours ago, with the appointment of new managers in the autonomous driving business and Optimus, Tesla’s humanoid robot project. . Ashok Elluswamy is now vice president of Autopilot and artificial intelligence software at Tesla, and Milan Kovac has become vice president of Optimus.
Both promotions, as Europa Press has been able to confirm, occurred before the public presentation last week of the Cybercab robotaxi, a Tesla prototype of a driverless taxi that will cost just under $30,000 and whose intention is for it to be operational between 2026 and 2027.
At the time, Musk hinted that the initial fleet of this robotaxis project would be made up of up to 7 million vehicles, although he eventually said it could be “tens of millions.”
