When Elon Musk first launched a bid to acquire Twitter three years ago, a move many of his supporters would grow to oppose, the entrepreneur’s most trusted lieutenant at Tesla quickly chimed in to offer his unconditional support.
“Thank you for what you’re doing. We all love you and are always behind you!” Omead Afshar wrote in a text message sent that same April day. “Not having a global platform that is truly free speech is dangerous for all.”
On Thursday, Forbes and CNBC reported that Afshar was fired, taking the blame for failing to turn around a precipitous fall in sales that traces its origins to the controversial Twitter purchase.
In the wake of his controversial management of the social media platform, Tesla’s once rapid EV sales growth first began to tail off in 2023 before turning negative for the first time last year.
Yet it was only after Musk completed his political journey from centrist to “Dark MAGA”, as he called himself, that sales really began to nosedive.
Tesla, which earlier this month saw the departure of its humanoid robot program director, did not reply to a Fortune request for a statement. Afshar was not reachable for comment.
Musk’s jack-of-all-trades
Starting out in the office to the CEO eight years ago, Afshar was a jack-of-all-trades deployed to solve various problems, earning him the reputation of being a “fixer”.
Asked once to describe his role at Tesla, Afshar paused to reflect. “It changes by the minute, it depends on the day of the week you ask me,” he said at the time. “I support the business doing anything and everything.”
His most prominent role came in setting up the Austin gigafactory, a plant with a larger footprint than the Pentagon. It would go on to become the heart of the company’s operations, where new technological innovations like the structural 4680 battery pack and the Cybertruck were first rolled out.
More recently, it has become home to a new “Cortex” data center for training its self-driving software and will be the manufacturing site for the upcoming CyberCab robotaxi model.
Shortly after Trump sailed to victory, Musk entrusted Afshar in November with solving his growing demand problem. However, it appears that there are some things even he couldn’t fix.
Tesla’s reputational decline from the best to the worst
Presiding over sales just as the “Tesla Takedown” boycotts were gathering steam in the United States, the pace of the brand’s descent has since gathered steam.
Global deliveries dropped 13% in the first quarter, with Musk going on to admit he was having “great difficulty” running his companies while serving the Trump administration.
The situation is even worse in Europe, where Musk’s fascist-like salute and his endorsement of Germany’s far-right AfD party, saw consumers flee the brand amid “Tesla shame”.
The latest data out of Europe, a market under Afshar’s remit, shows sales declining by 37% in the two months through May.
Whether Afshar could have solved this is highly doubtful since the problem rests heavily with Musk’s own decisions. Perhaps the best indicator charting his fall from grace has been the annual Axios Harris poll, in which consumers are asked to name two companies that come to mind with the best and worst reputations, respectively.
Months after the Twitter deal closed, the survey first registered 2023 a sharp drop in sentiment towards Tesla, which had climbed to 8th place only two years prior.
Last month, however, Musk’s carmaker joined Twitter (now “X”) and the Trump Organization among those named with the worst reputations.
