The Ongoing Risk of Executive Turnover in Elon Musk's Business Empire

　　Working at a company under Elon Musk has almost never been a stable job. Musk is known for his extremely demanding standards—once he focuses on an issue, someone typically loses their job—either being fired directly or being pushed to resign.

　　That scenario seems to have played out again this week: Both xAI and Tesla have seen executives leave.

　　At xAI, co-founder Tony Wu announced his departure earlier on Tuesday; he had previously led the reasoning team at the startup. Later that evening, another co-founder, Jimmy Ba, also said he would be leaving.

　　In total, this means half of xAI’s 12-person founding team has left. Coupled with my report last week about Musk’s dissatisfaction with Grok’s progress, I expect that Tony Wu and Jimmy Ba might not be the last xAI executives to depart in the coming weeks.

　　Meanwhile, at Tesla, veteran Raj Jegannathan, who had been with the company for 13 years, announced his departure on Monday.

　　Jegannathan had only been in his newly expanded role for a few months, overseeing Tesla’s sales and service operations. He took on this position after the previous chief sales officer and other key executives left last year. If he chose to leave voluntarily, it’s understandable: this longtime IT executive had no sales experience but was suddenly given a major responsibility, tasked with trying to reverse the sluggish growth of Tesla’s electric vehicle business. As Musk shifts his focus to longer-term projects like robotics and robotaxis, Tesla’s EV business has declined for two consecutive years.

　　To be fair, frequent executive turnover at Musk’s companies is nothing new—both xAI and Tesla lost many key executives last year as well.

　　Musk’s supporters might argue that constant weeding out of employees forces those who stay to work harder. But continuous personnel turmoil will ultimately harm the company: not only does it drain internal expertise and knowledge, but the company’s reputation can also affect future hiring. Certainly, there remains a core group of die-hard fans willing to work for Musk, but surely many engineers and salespeople think: life is short, there’s no need to endure this.

　　As SpaceX is expected to go public later this year, a key issue investors need to watch is: just how solid is the relationship between Musk and SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell? Shotwell is widely regarded as a crucial stabilizing force, and is likely the most important executive in all of Musk’s companies aside from Musk himself.

　　xAI and Tesla can withstand sporadic individual departures, but if Shotwell were to leave, it would immediately trigger a crisis.

　　Amazon's Latest Organizational Structure

　　In Amazon’s Super Bowl ad for Alexa, Chris Hemsworth pretends to be afraid of letting artificial intelligence into his home.

　　But it’s Amazon’s new hires who should really be afraid of Hemsworth himself—because he suddenly appeared on Amazon’s internal org chart in a very high position, reporting directly to CEO Andy Jassy.

　　We’re not joking. According to a screenshot of the org chart seen by The Information, Hemsworth’s title at Amazon was “Chief Charm Officer, Amazon Devices,” and his start date was February 5, just days before the Super Bowl.

　　Hemsworth’s “senior” position at Amazon didn’t last long. According to an employee, he has already been removed from the org chart.

　　Perhaps this is what they mean by streamlining management and reducing bureaucracy! — Katherine Perloff

　　Other News

• Music streaming and podcast platform Spotify announced a 7% revenue increase in Q4 2025, flat compared to the third quarter. Advertising revenue dropped by 4%, partially offsetting an 8% increase in subscription revenue.
• According to reports, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan are purchasing a mansion on Indian Creek, an artificial island in South Florida often referred to as the “billionaires’ bunker.”
• Leading Chinese AI company Zhipu AI anonymously released a new large language model under a different name on OpenRouter, a marketplace popular among developers for AI models.
• The second-largest ride-hailing company in the U.S., Lyft, reported Q4 revenue of $1.6 billion, up 3% year-over-year, but saw its stock price plunge 15% in after-hours trading. However, Lyft stated that if adjustments for legal, tax, and regulatory reserves are excluded, revenue should have grown by 13.5%.

Editor: Guo Mingyu