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Working at an Elon Musk company is rarely a stable gig. Musk is known to be an extremely demanding boss, and when he’s focused on a problem, heads will usually roll, either because he fires people or makes their lives so miserable they quit. That seems to have been the case again this week, with major executives at both xAI and Tesla heading for the exits.
At xAI, co-founder Tony Wu, who had been leading the startup’s teams working on reasoning, announced his departure early Tuesday. Late Tuesday, a second co-founder, Jimmy Ba, also said he was leaving. For those keeping track, that means half of xAI’s 12-person founding team no longer works at the company. And based on my reporting last week on Musk’s dissatisfaction with xAI’s progress on Grok, I expect Wu and Ba may not be the last senior xAI staffers to exit in the coming weeks.
At Tesla, meanwhile, 13-year company veteran Raj Jegannathan announced his departure on Monday. Jegannathan left just a few months into a new, expanded role that included overseeing Tesla sales and service. He took that job after the departure of the company’s previous top salesperson and other key executives last year. Assuming it was Jegannathan’s choice to leave, it’s hard to blame him—he was a longtime IT executive with no sales experience who was suddenly given an extremely hard job trying to revive growth in Tesla’s electric vehicle business, which is dealing with two years in a row of decline as Musk shifts his attention to longer-term bets like robots and robotaxis.
To be sure, the frequent turnover of executives at Musk’s companies isn’t new—xAI and Tesla both lost a significant number of important executives last year, too. Musk’s defenders would say that constantly kicking employees to the curb pushes those left to work harder. But at some point, constant turnover catches up with companies. Not only do they lose institutional knowledge, a company’s reputation also starts to weigh on new hiring. Yes, there is a hard core of Musk acolytes who would still work for him, but there has to be a good number of engineers and salespeople who take the view that life’s too short to deal with Musk.
Ahead of SpaceX’s expected initial public offering later this year, a key question for investors should be just how solid Musk’s relationship is with SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, who is widely seen as a steady hand and is probably the most important executive at any of Musk’s companies besides Musk himself. xAI and Tesla can survive a drip-drop of individual departures, but Shotwell’s exit would be an immediate crisis.
Amazon’s Updated Org Chart
In Amazon’s super bowl ad for Alexa, Chris Hemsworth pretends to be terrified of the risk of letting artificial intelligence into his home. But up and coming Amazon staffers should be more afraid of Hemsworth himself, because out of nowhere he landed on Amazon’s internal organizational chart, in such a high position that he reports directly to CEO Andy Jassy.
We’re serious. Amazon’s org chart identified Hemsworth as “Chief Heartthrob, Amazon Devices” hired Feb. 5, a few days before Sunday’s Big Game, according to a screen shot of the chart viewed by the Information.
Hemsworth’s stint as an Amazon heavyweight didn’t last long. He’s now been dropped from the org chart, according to an employee. That’s what you call streamlining layers of management and reducing bureaucracy!—Catherine Perloff
In Other News
• Spotify’s revenue grew 7% in the fourth quarter of 2025, the music streaming and podcast service reported, in line with the third quarter. A 4% drop in ad revenue partly offset 8% higher subscription revenue.
• Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan are reportedly purchasing a mansion on Indian Creek, a man-made island in South Florida often referred to as “Billionaire Bunker.”
• Zhipu, one of China’s prominent AI developers, has anonymously released its new large language model under a different name on OpenRouter, a popular AI model marketplace for developers.
• Lyft, the no. 2 ridehailing firm, reported 3% higher revenue of $1.6 billion in the fourth quarter, sending its stock plunging 15% in after-hours trading. But Lyft said that excluding changes to legal, tax, and regulatory reserves, its revenue would have risen 13.5%.
Today on The Information’s TITV
Check out our latest episode of TITV in which we discuss our exclusive reporting that Amazon is looking at launching marketplace for AI content.
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