What’s wrong? Tesla can’t retain its top managers


05/16/2018

While Elon Musk is trying to brush up mass production of his electric cars, top managers are leaving his company. The exodus of Tesla's executives began in February, and the other day, Matthew Schwall, who was in charge of car safety and moved to Waymo, left the company. In addition, senior vice president of development Doug Field took an indefinite leave.



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The turnover of staff in Elon Musk’s company is taking on an alarming scale: one of the top managers has been leaving the company starting from February. The last in this list were Matthew Schwall and Doug Field.

Matthew Schwall was predominantly responsible for the Tesla car security system. And recently there were problems - a woman killed at full speed, and Tesla Model S, crashed at high speed into the wall, causing the driver and passenger to die. Nevertheless, Mr. Schwall not just left Tesla, which could be related to investigation of these incidents. He went to Tesla's main competitor, Waymo. This is the former division of Alphabet, which manufactures unmanned vehicles. In a new place, Matthew Schwall took a similar position in the department of machine safety.  

Earlier, Elon Musk lost one of his main assistants, the "one of the most talented" leaders in the world, Doug Field, who was developing new models, such as Model 3. However, several months ago, Elon Musk took release of the company's massive electric vehicle under personal control. The media explained the departure of Mr. Field with problems that have arisen with this model. However, the company officially declares that the manager simply "needs time to recharge and spend time with his family."

Last month, head of development of the driver assistance system Autopilot, Jim Keller, also left the company. He moved to work at Intel Corp. In March, Tesla said goodbye to two top managers at once, and in February the salesman John McNeil, who now works for Lyft, left the company. Obviously, very bad things happen in Tesla, says well-known investor Jim Chanos, who heads the company Kynikos Associates Ltd. At the same time, the situation in Tesla reminds him of what happened in Valeant Pharmaceuticals and Enron Corp.

"It's always wrong if almost all your top managers leave the company amid high stock prices," Mr. Chanos said on the podcast from Bloomberg Masters in Business. "It means that something is wrong. I do not know what it is, but it's seen by almost all the top Tesla executives, and they leave the company, leaving options packages on the table. "

source: cnbc.com