Elon Musk is reportedly taking over responsibilities for Tesla’s sales in North America and Europe amid a leadership transition.
The CEO is going from “sleeping on Tesla’s factory floor” to now sleeping in the sales offices.
For years, Tesla was production-constrained and struggled to ramp up manufacturing to meet demand.
Around this time, CEO Elon Musk claimed he was “sleeping on the factory floor” to help with the production effort.
Tesla’s days of being production-constrained are now far behind the automaker, which currently operates its factories at about 50% capacity due to demand problems.
The company’s sales have been declining, partly due to Musk alienating Tesla’s customer base through his involvement in politics and controversial statements on social media.
Tesla blamed its poor performance in the first quarter on the Model Y changeover limiting production, but the company is about to release its second quarter delivery results, which are expected be just as bad as Q1 and Tesla can’t use the production changeover as an excuse.
We recently learned that Musk fired Omead Afshar, his former chief of staff, who had been responsible for overseeing Tesla’s operations in North America and Europe.
It appears that Musk is placing the blame for Tesla’s poor sales performance on Afshar.
According to a new report from Bloomberg, Musk will now personally oversee North American and European sales at Tesla following Afshar’s departure from the company.
The move will add responsibilities to the CEO, who is also CEO of SpaceX, the defacto leader at X, xAI, and also leading efforts at The Boring Company and Neuralink, while also claiming to be launching a new political party in the US.
However, he is reportedly not taking all of Afshar’s responsibilities as the manufacturing in those regions will fall again on Tom Zhu.
Zhu has long been the leader of Tesla’s operations in China and led the very successful Gigafactory Shanghai effort.
Gigafactory Shanghai quickly became Tesla’s best-performing manufacturing facility and to replicate the success in Texas, Musk made Zhu in charge of all Gigafactories back in late 2022.
However, we reported that Zhu was taking an even bigger role at Tesla as Musk was busy running several other companies and spending especially more time at his newly acquired Twitter.
We exclusively reported that Zhu was even made in charge of North American sales and became the de facto head of Tesla’s automotive business – second in command to Musk at Tesla.
However, he took a step back from global responsibilities in 2024 and returned to China.
Now, it sounds like Musk was again be relying on him for global manufacturing, but Zhu has also been having issues with sales in China.
Tesla’s current sales in the world’s largest EV market are down 22,000 units year-to-date compared to last year despite the new Model Y and record discounts.
Electrek’s Take
It looks like Elon is trying to put the blame on Afshar for Tesla’s demand problem even though he is clearly the main reason for them.
He is widely unpopular and it is affecting Tesla since he has made sure to be the face of the company for the last decade.
I don’t think him being in charge of sales is going to help much. Tesla is offering record incentives and its sales are dropping despite global EV sales booming. I wouldn’t surprised if Musk’s approach is to set unrealistic goals for the sales staff and then apply a ton of pressure with threats of more layoffs.
That’s what Tesla did in China in 2023-2024 and it led to a lot of problems, high turnover, and staffs reportedly falsying data to comply with the unrealistic goals.
If Tesla wants to get past its demand problems, I already have the solutions in my Secret Tesla Master Plan.
