Funny how that keeps happening.
Bye Bye Baby
Over the course of less than two weeks, three of Tesla’s top executives have resigned — and one announced his exit during an earnings call.
As insiders who spoke to Fortune magazine confirm, Tesla vice president of investor relations, Martin Viecha, announced that he was leaving the company at the end of this week’s quarterly earnings call, which came after mass layoffs, a dip in sales, and the recall of the Cybertruck.
In a post on X-formerly-Twitter — which, of course, the company’s CEO Elon Musk also owns — Viecha said that he is “retiring from the world of investor relations and moving on,” which will include spending time with his family.
Along with following a string of bad news for Tesla, whose new Cybertruck vehicles seem to keep literally falling apart, Viecha’s exit also follows just a week after Drew Baglino, the company’s now-former senior vice president of powertrain and energy engineering, announced his own resignation after spending 18 years with the company.
On April 15, the same day as Baglino’s declaration, executive Rohan Patel also revealed that he was parting ways with the company. Both of their exit announcements, of course, were posted to X.
Investor Chill
Despite Musk’s sunny outlook on the call, Viecha’s resignation might be extra problematic because, as Fortune notes, he had cultivated good relationships with company investors who have been put off by the CEO’s increasingly unpalatable behavior and rhetoric.
Indeed, during an on-air discussion about this latest exit on CNBC, wealth manager Ross Gerber insisted that although Musk performed well on the call itself, the loss of the man who acted as the “glue between management and shareholders and investors” is a blow indeed.
Tesla, Gerber told his CNBC co-panelists, “continues to lose seasoned top executives during this really important transition, and I find that to be concerning.”
“The monkey in the room,” quipped the CEO of the Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management firm, “is that there’s no demand for the vehicles, even if they flew.”
More on Tesla: As Tesla Profits Fall, Elon Musk Says Tesla Will Make a Cheaper Car After All
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