Yet another top Tesla executive has announced that he would be departing the company.
On Tuesday, Martin Viecha, the company’s president of investor relations, said he would be leaving Tesla after serving there for seven years. He’s now the third top executive that has departed the company, which has been facing major challenges, in less than two weeks.
Just last week, Drew Baglino resigned as the company’s senior vice president. He was one of only four named executive officers at the electric car company. He was responsible for leading the company’s technology and engineering development of its vehicles’ batteries.
Baglino had served with Tesla for 18 years, and many analysts and investors knew him well.
Those departures followed that of Rohan Patel, who served as the vice president of public policy and business development.
Viecha’s announced departure came toward the end of a first-quarter earnings call that Tesla held earlier this week. Many people believed that the call was a crucial crossroads for Tesla after it posted the worst quarter over the last four years.
CEO Elon Musk took a more tempered presence on the call, according to those who listened in, as he worked to reassure Tesla’s investors about the future of the company.
Many of the investors who were on the call had worked closely in the past with Viecha.
In a post that he wrote on both LinkedIn and X, Viecha wrote:
“About a month ago, I spoke with Elon and [chief financial officer] Vaibhav [Taneja], to announce that I’m going to be retiring from the world of investor relations and moving on. Working for Tesla for the past ~7 years has been the greatest privilege of my professional life.”
Viecha added that he would be leaving Tesla to “take a break and spend a lot of time with my family.”
Many investors said they believed that the earnings call was encouraging to them. Following the call, Tesla’s stock rose more than 12% during after-hours trading.
That being said, some investors are concerned about the exits of these high-ranking officials, but particularly of Viecha, because he had a solid relationship with many of those investors.
Making a recent appearance on CNBC, Dan Ives, a tech analyst for Wedbush, said that Tesla was in need of an “adult in the room,” but that Musk rose to that occasion during the earnings call.
But, Ross Gerber, who is the CEO of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth & Investment Management, said that investors shouldn’t give extra weight to the performance Musk gave on the call, or to some other signals the company is giving, including the exits of the company executives.
As he said directly to Ives on the CNBC appearance:
“Dan, you’re discounting the end of the call with Martin resigning. You and I have been working with Martin for a long time, and he is the glue between management and shareholders and investors.”
