Tesla parts ways with top executive and fixer for Elon Musk
One of
Elon Musk's
top lieutenants has left his job at
Tesla
amid plunging sales and a pivot to autonomous driving, artificial intelligence and robotics.
Omead Afshar, who was promoted to run sales and operations in North America and Europe last year, has left his role, according to two people familiar with the decision. Jenna Ferrua, director of North American human resources, has also departed from the company, they said.
Tesla, Mr Afshar and Ms Ferrua did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Bloomberg first reported the moves.
Mr Afshar's departure comes at a difficult time for Tesla as its sales and earnings decline. It has suffered from a lack of new models, increased competition — in particular in China — and a consumer backlash against Mr Musk's right-wing political activism in Europe and support of
US President Donald Trump.
READ MORE
Tesla's worldwide electric vehicle deliveries fell 13 per cent in the first quarter, and its net income plunged 71 per cent. That prompted Mr Musk to promise to 'allocat[e] far more of my time to Tesla' and reduce the time he spends in Washington. His so-called Department of Government Efficiency has been controversially slashing government jobs and spending.
Musk has since left his government role and publicly clashed with the president.
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Tesla's European sales fall for fifth consecutive month
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However, Tesla has been unable to reverse the trend, with sales in the UK and Europe declining 28 per cent in May, the fifth month in a row. The electric vehicle maker will next week report global delivery numbers for the second quarter, with analysts forecasting another double-digit fall.
Mr Afshar has worked for Tesla since 2017, starting in the office of the chief executive, before overseeing the construction of its vast 'Giga Texas' manufacturing plant in Austin from 2020.
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He has been described as 'firefighter' and 'executioner' for the world's richest man, being moved across Mr Musk's various companies to solve tough problems and conduct mass lay-offs, the Financial Times has previously reported.
In late 2022, he was part of the 'transition team' that fired more than 7,500 people at Twitter — now rebranded as X — and was given the nickname 'the Elon whisperer' by colleagues because of his ability to read the mood of the mercurial billionaire. Last year, he helped undertake a 10 per cent reduction in Tesla's workforce, shedding about 14,000 jobs.
It was not clear if Mr Afshar will be reassigned to another part of Musk's empire after leaving Tesla.
Mr Musk is conducting a broader overhaul of the electric vehicle maker, betting its future on autonomous driving powered by artificial intelligence and a humanoid robot called Optimus.
Last week, Tesla started a pilot programme of self-driving robotaxis in Austin that it says will eventually lead to owners being able to rent their cars out via a ride hailing app when not in use.
However, the technology is under investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration after multiple crashes in bad conditions such as mist or sun glare. Tesla relies solely on cameras mounted on its vehicles, while rivals like Google's Waymo driverless taxis use more expensive radar and lidar sensors. - Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
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Irish Times
37 minutes ago
- Irish Times
I love Wikipedia so much, I hardly even minded when it killed me off
I do a lot of complaining about technology in this column. I complain about the influence of tech corporations over public life. I complain about how AI presents any number of existential economic and cultural dangers. I complain about how Elon Musk and Sam Altman are doing the handiwork of the devil himself. There is, in my defence, a good deal to complain about, and I've got a column that needs writing. But I've been giving a lot of thought over the last while to one particular product of tech culture about which I'm wholeheartedly positive, and for which I'm profoundly grateful: Wikipedia. It seems increasingly obvious to me that Wikipedia is among the truly great cultural achievements of recent decades. It's an amazing and inspiring thing – both an endlessly useful tool and an infinitely ramifying monument to the value of knowledge. The fact that it is the work not of a publicly-traded corporation – of vainglorious executives and pampered employees – but of a vast network of ordinary people who are strangers to one another, invests it with not just a practical but a symbolic value. It represents everything that the internet can and should be, a utopian set of possibilities which, having animated the early online era, have mostly been buried under a trash heap of targeted advertising, hateful propaganda and useless AI slop. It must be protected at all costs. [ Capitalism is incompatible with any kind of human flourishing on this planet Opens in new window ] I have always valued it, as much for its idiosyncrasies as for its incredible expansiveness, but I have probably been guilty, over the years, of taking it for granted. Not any more. The remorseless incursion of so-called artificial intelligence into every corner of online life – which is to say, increasingly, almost every corner of life itself – has caused Wikipedia to stand out in bold relief for me. There is a shallow seductiveness to an app like ChatGPT . It presents itself, among other things, as a brilliant and erudite automated research assistant, of which you can ask almost any question, and which will immediately provide you with informative and fully-sourced answers. But anyone who has attempted to use ChatGPT, or any of its growing agglomeration of rivals, in this way will know that it continually just makes stuff up, that it is so unreliable as to be effectively worse than useless. READ MORE I am not, by the way, claiming that Wikipedia is infallible. I have fallen victim to its fallibility. Some years ago I received a bemused message from my agent, who had just got an email, marked 'URGENT', from the organisers of the Ryszard Kapuściński Award, a Polish literary prize for works of literary non-fiction. I had been nominated, they informed her, but they only awarded the prize to living authors and according to my Wikipedia page I had been dead for almost a year. They wanted her to confirm, by close of business, that I was still alive. The site was started in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, but it's a testament to its egalitarian spirit that neither of these guys has become particularly famous I realised pretty quickly what had happened: the Wikipedia page had been edited by the co-creators of a theatrical adaptation of my first book, in which a fictionalised version of me dies. 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Back in 2008 Baker wrote a great essay for the New York Review of Books called The Charms of Wikipedia. Ostensibly a review of a book called Wikipedia: the Missing Manual, the piece is mostly a long, idiosyncratically personal profession of love for Wikipedia itself, in which Baker – author of such sui generis wonders as The Mezzanine, Room Temperature, and The Fermata – reveals that he has, for some years, been a moderately prolific Wikipedia editor. (Under the username 'Wageless', he writes, he was a contributor to pages on such topics as bovine hormones, the film Sleepless in Seattle, hydraulic fluid, fruit cobbler, and the historiographical process of periodisation.) [ 'I walked through the fire all by myself': An image of a child lays bare barbarism in Gaza Opens in new window ] Much of the essay is concerned with Baker's involvement in a struggle against a group he calls 'the deletionists' – people hell-bent on erasing topics deemed insufficiently notable for Wikipedia pages. 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(In fact, I had to look up the Wikipedia page for Wikipedia to remind myself who its founders were.) There is no Silicon Valley-style cult of the founder here, in other words; the site is owned and run by a non-profit foundation, and its real creators are its tens of millions of anonymous volunteer editors. 'It was constructed,' as Baker puts it, 'by strangers who disagreed about all kinds of things but who were drawn to a shared, not-for-profit purpose ... And when people did help they were given a flattering name. They weren't called 'Wikipedia's little helpers,' they were called 'editors.'' There is something ennobling, in other words, about the whole project – in all its vastness and eccentricity and frivolity and grandeur – just as there is something ennobling about democracy. The greatest thing about Wikipedia, of course, is that it works exceptionally well. It works not despite its existing outside the machinery of profit, but precisely because of it. 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Irish Times
2 hours ago
- Irish Times
Tesla's robotaxi: modest rollout, wild stock ride
Tesla 's recent robotaxi launch sparked a brief frenzy, sending shares more than 10 per cent higher and adding some $100 billion to its market value, before gains quickly evaporated. One can see why the rally faded. After all, the debut was modest at best: a handful of Teslas operating with a human safety supervisor in the front passenger seat, limited to a geo-fenced area during specific hours, and only available to invite-only riders. This cautious roll-out stands in sharp contrast to Elon Musk 's years of grand promises about fully autonomous robotaxis operating everywhere. Compared with Google 's Waymo, which has been testing driverless fleets under strict supervision for years, Tesla's launch looks more like a tentative experiment than a breakthrough. READ MORE Still, that some investors thought otherwise is not surprising. Ordinarily, stock price volatility eases as a company's valuation grows, but not Tesla. Data from Bespoke Investment shows the only period when Tesla's daily volatility was higher than now was during the early days of Covid. Over the past year it has seen four separate rallies exceeding 20 per cent, and four declines each exceeding 20 per cent. These include a 150 per cent surge in late 2024 and a drop of more than 50 per cent earlier this year. Since going public in 2010, Tesla has averaged 4.25 bull or bear cycles per year. 'It's already had five in 2025,' adds Bespoke. Tesla's volatility persists with almost stubborn consistency, defying the usual calming effect of scale – a fitting mirror to its chief executive's penchant for grandiose promises and reality checks alike.
Irish Times
2 hours ago
- Irish Times
Is it worth my while to give half my inheritance to my husband to avoid tax?
I just want to confirm my understanding of the position around deed of variation/family arrangement with wills in Ireland. I am due to inherit €30,000 from my brother-in-law and I am wondering if it is worth my while to gift my husband half, in order to avoid tax ? Ms C.L. When someone draws up a will, they generally have two things in mind. First, they want to take care of those closest and dearest to them; second, they want to minimise how much of their estate gets taken in tax. READ MORE There's an industry of lawyers and tax advisers making a very good living servicing this demand – as evidenced by last week's article about wealthy individuals in Ireland buying farmland to avail of an inheritance tax loophole while it lasts. This can be a game of cat and mouse. New reliefs are introduced, advisers notice they can be used entirely legitimately but not in the way the Government originally intended to benefit their (generally) wealthy clients and, over time, amendments are brought in to try to restore the measure to its original purpose. But what you are talking about is a much longer established structure called a deed of variation, otherwise known as a deed of family arrangement. Anyone who has been in the UK might be more familiar with it as, in that jurisdiction, it can be a very useful way of effectively rewriting someone's will – at least in relation to any inheritance you are in line to receive – to take account of changed circumstances, such as the arrival of children, grandchildren or in-laws since the will was originally drafted. It can also be used in intestacy where the absence of a will might mean, for instance, that a cohabiting partner could otherwise be left with nothing. [ Wills and spouses: Why you cannot just cut a wife out of your will Opens in new window ] In the UK, such a deed of variation must be in writing and must be signed within two years of the original benefactor dying. One of the advantages is that rather than being seen as you inheriting and then passing some of that benefit onwards, the benefit you allocate to anyone else under such a deed is considered as coming to them directly from the person who has died. So what does that mean for you? Well, while there is a lot of similarity between the law here and in the UK due to our shared heritage, there are some significant differences too, not least in relation to inheritance. For instance, while, in the UK, the tax liability is on the estate of the dead person, in Ireland, the liability rests with the individual beneficiaries depending on the amount involved and the beneficiary's relationship with the dead person. In-laws are considered as 'strangers' in terms of inheritance. As such, they come under the lowest category C tax-free threshold And there is a key difference of approach also when it comes to deeds of variation. While there is nothing stopping you exercising a deed of variation to gift your husband half of what you are inheriting from your brother-in-law, it will have no impact on your tax liability. In Ireland, as Revenue has confirmed for me, as far as liability for Capital Acquisitions Tax (CAT or inheritance tax) is concerned, you will be considered to have taken the full €30,000 inheritance from your brother-in-law with your husband being seen as taking a subsequent €15,000 gift from you. Now, in practical terms, that raises no tax bill for your husband as gifts and inheritances between spouses are exempt from inheritance. But it could have tax implications for the recipient of your largesse if you were looking to have a friend benefit, for instance. And it does mean you will face a tax bill. In-laws are considered as 'strangers' in terms of inheritance. As such, they come under the lowest category C tax-free threshold – currently €20,000. So you will face a 33 per cent tax bill on at least €10,000 of this inheritance – €3,300. It could be more if, as would not be unusual, you previously received an inheritance – or, indeed a gift of more than €3,000 in one year – from a friend, in-law, cousin or more distant relation. They all come under category C and that €20,000 tax-free limit is a lifetime one extending back to cover any inheritance or large gift received since December 5th, 1991. That leaves you with two choices: you can accept the inheritance and pay the tax due on anything over your tax-free threshold, or you can disclaim the inheritance. However, that second option is an all or nothing one. You cannot just disclaim €10,000 of the €30,000 so that you stay within your tax-free limit. You will be giving all of it up. Nor have you any right, if you disclaim, to influence where the inheritance goes. That will be determined by the wording of the will. The money would most likely go to other beneficiaries under a residuary clause – a clause governing the distribution of any assets not specifically allocated to any person or institution. The bottom line is that, if the intention is to reduce your tax bill, a deed of variation will not do it and, of course, you will have incurred legal costs in getting advice on and drawing up any such deed. Please send your queries to Dominic Coyle, Q&A, The Irish Times, 24-28 Tara Street Dublin 2, or by email to with a contact phone number. This column is a reader service and is not intended to replace professional advice
