Category:Former Tesla Employees
The people who leave Tesla and turn up again on this wiki are almost all hardware engineers, and what they go on to build is more hardware: motor controllers, fusion reactors, battery-storage systems. This category collects biographical entries on people who worked at Tesla, Inc., and it does not behave like the alumni networks of the software companies covered elsewhere here. Where those produce marketplaces and developer tools, this one produces power electronics, and a pair of its members left the same engineering organization to found the same company.
Background
Tesla builds electric vehicles, batteries and energy-storage systems, and Elon Musk has served as its chief executive and product architect since the early years of the company. Two internal groups account for nearly every departure recorded in this category: the Autopilot team, which builds the driver-assistance and autonomy software and the hardware it runs on, and the powertrain organization that designs motors, inverters, chargers and battery packs.
That concentration is what makes the category coherent. The company employs people across manufacturing, sales, energy and software, but the entries here come almost entirely from two engineering pipelines, and the destinations follow from the training rather than from the brand.
The Autopilot line
Andrej Karpathy is the senior figure. He was a founding member of OpenAI, left in 2017 to join Tesla as Director of Artificial Intelligence, and led the team building Autopilot and the company's autonomous driving software before returning to independent AI research and education.
Below that level the pattern is engineer-to-founder. Jason Kaufmann interned on hardware in 2021, joined full-time on the Autopilot AI team from 2022 to 2023 and rose to senior hardware design engineer, then co-founded a company developing compact fusion reactors for ships and off-grid power. Justin Cohen spent roughly four years at Tesla on battery design, electromagnetic design, motors, chargers and converters, and co-founded the same company. Their founding team is described as combining experience from Tesla, SpaceX, Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania across plasma physics, nuclear engineering and electrical engineering.
Berni Hausleitner worked as a full-stack engineer on the Autopilot team building internal tooling, and that exposure to inefficiencies in large-scale supply-chain operations informed the artificial-intelligence company for distributors and manufacturers he went on to found.
The powertrain line
Ethan Childerhose worked as a Tesla engineer on power electronics and electric vehicle drivetrain systems, then co-founded an electric vehicle hardware company that benchmarks its own motor controller directly against the inverter in the Tesla Model 3. That is the tightest version of the pattern in this category: the same component class, built again by someone who built it inside the company first.
Rushi Shah worked at Tesla, and at NASA and Northrop Grumman before that, then moved into consumer software. Daivik Goel held product and engineering roles at Tesla and Cisco Meraki before founding a global payroll and employer-of-record company, and is one of the few members here whose next step was commercial rather than technical.
The board contributes entries of a different kind. Joe Gebbia joined the Tesla board in 2022, bringing design and consumer-product experience from Airbnb, and Jack Hartung joined in 2025 after more than two decades as a senior finance leader at Chipotle Mexican Grill.
See also
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