Elon Musk moves his top lieutenant at Tesla to SpaceX after a controversy

Elon Musk’s top lieutenant at Tesla, Omead Afshar, is now working at SpaceX after leaving Tesla over a strange controversy.

Omead Afshar’s official position at Tesla is director of the office of the CEO – Elon Musk’s office. But in practice, he has been seen as Musk’s chief of staff since Sam Teller, Musk’s longtime top lieutenant, left the company in 2019.

More recently, he was known to lead the construction of Gigafactory Texas, and he is often the go-between with Musk and his direct reports.

This summer, a report came out that claimed Afshar was about to be fired from Tesla over a curious controversy where he allegedly placed an order for a “special glass” for a “secret project,” which got flagged by the automaker’s finance department as suspicious – triggering an internal investigation.

The basis of the investigation was that an employee was using company resources to secure materials for a project that potentially wasn’t related to Tesla.

According to the report, Tesla had already fired employees related to the investigation, and Afshar was going to be next.

Now a few months later, we don’t have an update on the internal investigation, but a new report from Bloomberg claims that Afshar is now working at SpaceX, another company owned and led by Musk:

Afshar has been named vice president: Starship production at the company, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., according to two of the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information.

Tesla, SpaceX, Musk, nor Afshar commented on the report. Afshar hasn’t updated his LinkedIn profile, which still shows he works at Tesla.

Some people work simultaneously at both Tesla and SpaceX, but Afshar has not been seen at Gigafactory Texas, which is also Tesla’s headquarters, in weeks.

Electrek’s Take

Tesla is very stingy about promoting execs (officially) to senior executive positions, where they would need to report whether they are still at the company or any insider trading.

In other companies, Afshar would have probably fit the requirements, but not at Tesla.

But now we probably will never know what happened here, but it looks like Musk might not be able to use Afshar at Tesla anymore so he is working at SpaceX now.