--- title: "Tesla and xAI Staff Are Fleeing as Musk Becomes Increasingly Erratic" description: "Employees ranging from senior leaders to engineers are quitting Elon Musk's companies — and often joining his rivals." date: "2025-10-04" modified: "2025-10-04" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/future-society/tesla-xai-staff-fleeing" categories: - "Advanced Transport" - "Elon Musk" - "Future Society" - "Tesla" - "The Industrialists" --- # Tesla and xAI Staff Are Fleeing as Musk Becomes Increasingly Erratic ![Employees ranging from senior leaders to engineers are quitting Elon Musk's companies — and often joining his rivals.]() *Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Kevin Diestch / Getty Images* 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. "I love Tesla and my time there," another former worker told the *FT*. "But nobody that I know there isn't thinking about politics. Who the hell wants to put up with it?" Tangled up in that political sentiment, many employees are becoming dispirited at what they perceive as Musk abandoning the company's original eco-conscious vision in favor of robotaxis and AI. Giorgio Balestrieri, an engineer who worked for Tesla's energy division for eight years, [lambasted Musk in a searing LinkedIn post]() after quitting the company, accusing him of dealing "huge damage to Tesla's mission" and working with an administration that is "slowing down the energy transition." Last year, Musk tossed out plans to build an affordable, $25,000 EV that fans had long anticipated, and that many at the company saw as essential to driving up sales and further spearheading a transition to clean electric cars. After that move, several top brass left Tesla, and its director of vehicle programs Daniel Ho quit and joined its competitor Waymo. The head of Tesla's supercharger division Rebecca Tinucci left for Uber, after Musk [laid off her entire team](). "Elon's behavior is affecting morale, retention, and recruitment," a long-time Musk lieutenant told the *FT*. Musk "went from a position from where people of all stripes liked him, to only a certain section." **More on Elon Musk**: *[New Evidence Links Elon Musk to Epstein’s Island]()* ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()