It’s been a difficult week for Tesla. Not long after Elon Musk and President Donald Trump’s very-public social media spat led Tesla shares to take their greatest single-day drop ever on Thursday—erasing $152 billion off its market cap—one of Tesla’s top engineers confirmed on social media late Friday afternoon that he was leaving the company.
Milan Kovac, who oversaw the development of Tesla’s “Optimus” humanoid robot posted on X that he had made “the most difficult decision of my life” and would be “moving out of my position,” confirming a Bloomberg report from earlier Friday afternoon that he was departing the company.
