27 Comments Tesla has reportedly fired its head of operations for North America and Europe, a controversial employee who rose to the leadership position after serving as Elon Musk’s chief of staff. As we previously reported, Omead Afshar had an interesting career trajectory, to say the least. According to his LinkedIn profile, he studied biomedical engineering at UC Irvine and found himself working at medical equipment manufacturer St. Jude Medical from 2011 to 2017. Then, he did a short 7-month stint as “Manager, High Voltage Operations and Operations Business Systems” at healthcare giant Abbott in Los Angeles before finding himself working in the “office of the CEO” under Elon Musk. Advertisement - scroll for more content After Musk’s longtime chief of staff (officially the director of the office of the CEO), Sam Teller, left in 2019, Afshar was seen as taking over that role by many people working under Musk at his many companies, but especially Tesla, where Afshar started to lead some projects. For example, Musk credited Afshar for leading the construction of Gigafactory Texas. In 2022, Afshar reportedly got in hot water at Tesla. A report claimed that Afshar was about to be fired from Tesla over a curious controversy where he allegedly placed an order for a “special glass” for a “secret project,” which the automaker’s finance department flagged as suspicious, triggering an internal investigation. The basis of the investigation was that an employee was using company resources to secure materials for a project that potentially had no relation to Tesla. According to the report, Tesla had already fired employees related to the investigation, and Afshar was next in line. The project has been linked to the story that Musk was planning to build a glasshouse near Austin, which was confirmed in his biography by Walter Isaacson; however, the project never came to fruition. Tesla never disclosed