The Tesla brain drain
Today’s must-read: The future of the struggling car company rests on Elon Musk more than ever before.
 

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Whether through layoffs or resignations, Tesla has lost many of the employees who helped build the world’s most valuable car company. Without them, Elon Musk is about to face his biggest challenge yet, writes Patrick George.

(Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic. Sources: Cgtrader; Getty.)

 

Before DOGE, there was Twitter. In 2023, Elon Musk seemed too distracted by his latest venture to run the world’s most valuable car company. Tesla was faltering as he focused on remaking (and renaming) the social-media network. So at Tesla’s investor-day event in Austin that March, Musk responded with a rare show of force. He was joined onstage by a cadre of more than a dozen of the company’s top executives, all to signal that even if he was extremely busy, Tesla was run by a world-class team: “We’ve obviously got significant bench strength here,” Musk said. Sure enough, Tesla closed out 2023 with the best sales it’s ever had.

Musk is in bad need of a similar comeback right now as he returns from Washington to focus on his struggling car company.

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