November 29, 2024
Elon Musk has promoted Iranian-American Omead Afshar, who worked in his office in what many saw as a “chief of staff” position, to a top executive role at Tesla at the age of 37. According to his LinkedIn profile, he studied biomedical engineering at the University of California Irvine and found himself working at medical equipment manufacturer St. Jude Medical from 2011 to 2017.
But he then found himself working under Musk at Tesla. After Musk’s longtime chief of staff, Sam Teller, left in 2019, Afshar was seen as taking over that role by many people working under Musk at his many companies, but especially Tesla, where Afshar started to lead some projects.
For example, Musk credited Afshar for leading the construction of Tesla’s Gigafactory in Texas. In 2022, Afshar reportedly got in hot water at Tesla. A report claimed Afshar was about to be fired over a curious controversy where he allegedly placed an order for a “special glass” for a “secret project,” which the automaker’s finance department flagged as suspicious triggering an internal investigation.
The basis of the investigation was that an employee was using company resources to secure materials for a project that potentially wasn’t related to Tesla. According to the report, Tesla had already fired employees related to the investigation, and Afshar was going to be next.
The project has been linked to a story that Musk was planning to build himself a glass house near Austin, which was confirmed in his biography, but the project never came to be. Tesla never disclosed what happened with its internal investigation, but it was later reported that Musk moved Afshar to SpaceX for a while. Now, he is back at Tesla. The Wall Street Journal reports that Musk has made Afshar vice president of operations in North America and Europe, where he will be in charge of sales and manufacturing.
This would make him one of the top execs at Tesla. Tom Zhu, Tesla’s longtime head of operations in China, was given those responsibilities last year and had unofficially become Musk’s “Number 2” at Tesla, but, earlier this year, Zhu went back to China to lead operations there.
