Two high-ranking executives have left Tesla on the same day the electric carmaker laid off thousands of workers, TechCrunch has confirmed.
Drew Baglino, Tesla’s SVP of Powertrain and Energy, and Rohan Patel, Vice President of Public Policy and Business Development, have left the company, Patel told TechCrunch. Patel said he decided to leave because of “[b]ig general changes” to the company which he declined to specify. Their departures were first reported by Bloomberg.
“Good for me and hopefully also good for Tesla,” Patel said in a message to TechCrunch. “I’ve had an amazing run and achieved far more than I could have ever imagined as a result of working with the best policy/bizdev team in the business.” Baglino he said in a post on X that it was a “difficult decision” to leave after 18 years at Tesla. Tesla CEO Elon Musk thank you both of them about their time at the company in posts on his social media platform, X.
Their departures come as Tesla lays off thousands of employees in an effort to cut costs and boost productivity, according to an internal email sent to staff by Musk, which Electrek and Bloomberg News reported for the first time. The electric automaker is cutting “more than 10%” of its global workforce, Musk said in the email. Tesla is finished in 2023 with over 140,000 employeesmeaning the cuts could affect more than 14,000 people.
Musk announced the layoffs just two weeks after Tesla reported its first annual sales decline in three years, amid a broader decline in demand for electric vehicles. The company has warned investors that sales growth could be “significantly lower” in 2024 than its stated target of 50% growth each year. It’s also somewhat in between product cycles for the first time in years, with the expensive Cybertruck only recently entering production and the popular Model Y entering its fourth year without major updates.
“As we prepare the company for our next phase of growth, it is critically important that we look at every aspect of the company for cost reductions and productivity gains,” Musk said in the email. Tesla’s growth, he said, has led to “overlapping of roles and job functions in some areas.”
“As part of this effort, we undertook a thorough review of the organization and made the difficult decision to reduce our headcount by more than 10% worldwide. There is nothing I hate more, but it has to be done. This will allow us to be lean, innovative and hungry for the next round of growth,” Musk wrote.
Baglino’s departure is the second time a top executive has left the company in the past year, as Tesla CFO Zachary Kirkhorn stepped down in August 2023. Baglino oversaw engineering for the company’s motor and battery technologies. He had also become one of the most responsive executives on Musk’s social media platform. Patel, who spent years as President Barack Obama’s special assistant and climate and energy adviser, has been engaging with Tesla customers and fans alike in recent months.
Tesla shipped a record 1.8 million electric vehicles in 2023. But the company spent much of the year cutting prices on its most popular models in an effort to offset the impact of high interest rates and increased global competition. The company has also reportedly abandoned — or at least delayed — plans to build a lower-cost EV that would sell from around $25,000, opting instead to use the underlying platform being developed to power a purported robotaxi that Musk said will debut on August 8th.
This story and headline have been updated to include news of the departures of Drew Baglino and Rohan Patel.
