Elon Musk Doesn’t Work Alone. These Are Tesla’s Other Key Leaders

Executive turnover at Tesla Inc. was a major theme in 2018, and it’s continued into this year even as Elon Musk has turned a corner in other respects to running the electric-car maker.

Dane Butswinkas, who was brought on as general counsel in December after Musk’s run-in with U.S. securities regulators, is leaving and returning full time to his trial practice at Williams & Connolly after just two months.

The culture of a white-shoe Washington law firm and scrappy, California-based Tesla are likely worlds apart, and Musk is a notoriously demanding chief executive officer. But turnover at Tesla has become so common that the market reaction to the latest change in management was muted. Jonathan Chang, a vice president in Tesla’s legal department who has been at the company for almost eight years, is taking over effective immediately. Last month, in the final moments of the quarterly earnings call, Musk announced that Chief Financial Officer Deepak Ahuja was retiring.

Musk has long expressed contempt for rigid reporting lines. The company he has shaped in his image continues to prioritize nimbleness and flexibility over a clear chain of command, even as its workforce ballooned in recent years. As of Dec. 31, Tesla had 48,817 full-time employees, according to an annual regulatory filing. In January, Musk announced plans to cut 7 percent of the workforce.

Tesla’s upper ranks include dozens of executives, most of whom never see the limelight—and that’s by design. Aside from the charismatic boss, the company has always focused attention on products over the people who make them.

But an aversion to publicly disclosing a management team or even the names of its upper leadership is deeply unusual. There’s no indication on Tesla’s website of the people who hold major decision-making roles. That’s not how it works at Apple Inc., General Motors Co. or Uber Technologies Inc., all of which provide a list of key leaders. The investor relations page of Tesla’s website just lists three people, including Ahuja.

In an effort to shed light on Tesla executives who aren’t named Elon Musk, Bloomberg searched public references and interviewed several current and former employees to compile a list of key executives. Tesla is now nearly 16 years old, but many leaders on this list have been at the company fewer than five years. These are the men and women that shareholders and customers are counting on to ramp up Model 3 production, bring new vehicles to market and lead the world’s transformation from a mine-and-burn economy to a sustainable future.