As Elon Musk continues to unravel on the world stage, so does his business empire — at least if employee churn is any indication. At Tesla and xAI, the Financial Times reports, the centibillionaire’s ruthless demands, chaotic decision-making, and deteriorating public image are driving away senior leaders and rank and file talent, many of whom are fleeing to Musk’s biggest rivals.
“The one constant in Elon’s world is how quickly he burns through deputies,” a Musk adviser told the paper. “Even the board jokes, there’s time and then there’s ‘Tesla time.’ It’s a 24/7 campaign-style work ethos. Not everyone is cut out for that.”
Many executives leave of their own accord. Most notably, Linda Yaccarino stepped down as CEO of X in July, shortly after the site’s AI chatbot Grok had a legendary meltdown that saw it praise Nazis and call itself “MechaHitler.” Behind the scenes, reports suggest Yaccarino had grown fed up with Musk slowly icing her out from making decisions and undermining her attempts to resuscitate the platform’s ad revenue that had tanked after he took it over when it was still called Twitter.
But she’s far from alone. Mike Liberatore served as chief financial officer at xAI, Musk’s AI firm that now also operates X after the two merged, for just three months. He left for OpenAI — run by Musk’s arch-nemesis Sam Altman — claiming he’d been working more than 120 hours per week. xAI’s general counsel Robert Keele quit after 16 months in August, lamenting in a tweet: “I love my two toddlers and I don’t get to see them enough.”
Not even the company’s own cofounder, Igor Babuschkin, wanted to stick around. In August, he left to launch his own VC firm focused on funding AI safety research.
Per the FT, X also lost two communications executives who quit to rejoin their old employers, and a host of senior engineers. Some of these engineers fled to OpenAI.
So many of Musk’s quondam underlings have defected to OpenAI, in fact, that Musk recently sued the ChatGPT maker for allegedly running a scheme that deliberately targets his employees in order to gain access to his company’s trade secrets — something that reeks of jealousy that Musk’s friend-turned-foe Altman is leading the darling of the AI industry.
“Elon’s got a chip on his shoulder from ChatGPT and is spending every waking moment trying to put Sam out of business,” one recent top departee told the FT.
How Musk treats his longtime employees does little to instill loyalty in the ranks. Last month, he ruthlessly fired 500 xAI employees on Grok’s data annotation team and replaced a veteran manager who followed him from Tesla after working there for for over a decade with a kid in college.
This summer, Musk also fired a longtime close confidant, Omead Afshar, who served as Tesla’s head of sales and operations in North America. The personnel change came amid plunging sales at the EV automaker. Arguably, Afshar was singled out unfairly; it was clear that Musk’s controversial personal behavior and politics — ranging from backing Donald Trump’s reelection campaign, gutting the federal government through DOGE, and performing a series of Nazi salutes in public — were tanking his brand’s image and driving its historically liberal customers away.
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