Senior figures from Tesla’s US sales division, its battery and drivetrain units, the comms shop, and even the chief information officer have walked. Musk’s much-hyped Optimus robot team has been gutted, with AI leads bolting for Meta and other rivals.

According to the Financial Times, the churn is even worse at xAI, the two-year-old outfit Musk bolted onto his vanity project X this spring.

Its chief financial officer lasted all of 102 days before defecting to Sam Altman at OpenAI, boasting about how he survived 120-hour weeks. The general counsel left after 16 months, signing off with an AI-generated video of a lawyer screaming while shovelling molten coal.

“Elon’s got a chip on his shoulder about ChatGPT and is spending every waking moment trying to put Sam out of business,” one former insider told the Financial Times. That paranoia has turned into lawsuits accusing OpenAI of poaching engineers and stealing data centre secrets.

Meanwhile, Musk’s politics are pushing staff out the door. His cheerleading for Donald Trump and dabbling with far-right provocateurs has alienated liberal customers and triggered some of the 14,000 layoffs Tesla swung through in April 2024. Sales boss Omead Ashfar, once Musk’s trusted “executioner,” was dumped in June, with his deputy following.

The supposedly stable Tesla has lost key veterans like Drew Baglino, who ran power-train and energy, and battery lifer Vineet Mehta. The Cybertruck rollout chief and Model Y overseer David Zhang both walked, while director of vehicle programmes Daniel Ho joined Waymo after Musk killed off the $25,000 “Model 2” EV.

xAI hasn’t fared better. Linda Yaccarino quit after being sidelined when X was swallowed into Musk’s AI shop, followed by co-founder Igor Babuschkin, who set up his own AI safety group. Senior engineers fled to OpenAI after clashing with Musk loyalists.

The Grok chatbot fiasco, where Musk’s demand to make it “less woke” led to it praising Adolf Hitler, hasn’t helped. Nor has the bizarre “Ani bot,” a flirtatious avatar installed as a hologram in xAI’s lobby, which sparked outrage after having sexually explicit chats with teenage users.

“Elon is the boss, the alpha and anyone who doesn’t treat him that way, he finds a way to delete,” said one former Tesla executive.

Tesla chair Robyn Denholm insists the company is still a “magnet for talent.” Yet with Musk running five firms and burning deputies on a 24/7 cycle, plenty inside reckon it’s only a matter of time before the magnet flips polarity.