Tesla’s 2023 Investor Day put 14 named executives on stage, and Elon Musk told the audience on March 1, 2023, that the company had “significant bench strength.” Seven of those 14 have since left, according to an Electrek count published on Nov. 9. The latest exit, energy and charging chief Mike Snyder in October, comes from a Wall Street Journal report that Tesla has not confirmed.
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Musk supplied his own sequel on Nov. 7. Replying on X after announcing the end of Cybertruck production, he wrote that there are a “very limited number of smart, dedicated people.”
The seven departures, in order
Electrek’s tally, published on Nov. 9, starts with Zach Kirkhorn, the chief financial officer, who left in August 2023. Colin Campbell, vice president of powertrain engineering, followed in 2024 and is now chief technology officer at Redwood Materials. Drew Baglino, senior vice president of powertrain and energy engineering, left in April 2024 after 18 years. Rebecca Tinucci, head of Supercharging, was fired that same month along with most of her team.
The later exits came from engineering depth rather than finance. David Lau, vice president of software engineering, told his team he was leaving after twelve years, a move Bloomberg reported on April 4, 2025. Pete Bannon, who ran chip programs including Dojo, left in August 2025 as Musk ordered the Dojo supercomputer effort shut down and its remaining staff reassigned.
Snyder, a vice president of energy and charging, is the seventh. Electrek attributes his October 2026 departure to the Wall Street Journal and notes that Tesla has not verified it.
Sorted by function, four of the seven departures sat in the group that builds and charges the cars: Campbell and Baglino in powertrain, Tinucci in Supercharging and Snyder in energy and charging. Lau covered software, Bannon covered hardware and chips, and Kirkhorn covered finance. The 2023 stage therefore lost its powertrain bench almost entirely, even though the hardware those executives presented, from battery cells to Supercharger buildout, remains central to Tesla’s pitch to shareholders.
The seven who are still listed
Electrek checked LinkedIn for the other seven presenters and found all of them still at Tesla: Tom Zhu, Lars Moravy, Franz von Holzhausen, Ashok Elluswamy, Karn Budhiraj, Laurie Shelby and Brandon Ehrhart. The article does not give their job titles, so the count of survivors rests on those profile pages rather than on any Tesla statement.
The figure of 14 is Electrek’s count of named presenters. CNBC’s contemporaneous account counted 17 company leaders on stage, so a different definition of presenter would move the arithmetic. Martin Viecha, the longtime head of investor relations who left in April 2024, ran the event’s investor side and is not among the seven.
Cybertruck, Cybercab and the talent argument
Musk announced on Nov. 6 that Cybertruck production at Gigafactory Texas would wind down around the middle of 2027, “to make room for increased Cybercab production,” as he put it in a post on X. Electrek estimates annual Cybertruck sales at about 30,000, roughly 12% of the 250,000 units the line was planned to build. Musk did not say how long Tesla will keep selling existing inventory or what happens to parts and service for current owners.
The explanation then shifted twice. In the Nov. 7 reply, Musk said Tesla cannot assign its scarce talent to Cybercab while also keeping the Cybertruck production line, supply chain and engineering staffed. By the morning of Nov. 9 he was describing the “opportunity cost of the complexity of Cybertruck.” Electrek argues that Giga Texas has ample floor space, which leaves the talent argument as the stronger candidate and ties it back to the 2023 stage.
The timing matters for how the talent claim reads. Electrek notes that the Cybertruck wind-down arrives roughly three and a half years after first deliveries, and that the Nov. 6 post, the Nov. 7 reply and the Nov. 9 follow-up came within about three days of each other. Three different rationales in that span make the talent explanation hard to test against anything beyond Musk’s own words and the departure list above.
The pattern is not limited to Cybertruck. Musk announced the end of the Model S and Model X on the fourth-quarter 2025 earnings call, citing “Autonomy,” and Electrek noted that both cars already share the same Level 2 driver-assistance hardware, which made the stated reason an odd fit. Production was to stop by the end of the second quarter of 2026, with the Fremont line earmarked for the Optimus humanoid robot.
What remains unresolved is who fills the gap Snyder leaves, and whether the survivors of the 2023 lineup can cover Cybercab, Optimus and the energy business at once. Electrek’s reporting says Tesla has not addressed the Snyder exit publicly, and Musk’s own Nov. 7 sentence is the closest thing to an official explanation of why the bench thinned.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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