Charles Mwangi Leaves Tesla For a Secretive Startup

Charles Mwangi, Tesla’s former Senior Director of Engineering announced recently on LinkedIn that he has decided to leave the company after 6 years.

“After slightly over 6 years, I have decided to leave Tesla,” he said on the post. “My time at Tesla has been one of the most enriching and fulfilling experiences in my life. I’ve had the privilege to work alongside the world’s most talented and resilient people, in pursuit of a worthy mission.” he continues.

He also announced that he is moving on to a whole different industry, a stealth startup as indicated in his LinkedIn profile. A stealth startup is a marketing term well known in the venture capital community where a company operates in stealth mode to protect its intellectual ideas.

He is joining the secretive company with his colleague who also worked at Tesla. It is still unknown what they are working on in the new venture but the invisibility cloak might be removed later on, sometime in the future.

Charles Mwangi has worked at both Toyota and Nissan before joining Tesla. At Tesla, he was responsible for body manufacturing engineering, body equipment controls and maintenance engineering, stamping manufacturing engineering and Tesla Tool and die. He has been working in the car manufacturing industry since 2003 and it is interesting to see what industry he decided to make the jump to.

Charles Mwangi’s exit from Tesla comes at a weird time. We have seen some high profile exits (20 excluding Charles) in 2018 alone and it shows the high employee turnover rate at Tesla. It also comes at a critical time when they are ramping up production of the Model 3 as well as laying grounds on a new Gigafactory at China and the imminent announcement of Model Y.