After spending 17 years with Tesla, the EV firm’s vice president Sendil Palani has announced departure on Monday, March 9, at a time when the company is looking to focus more on artificial intelligence.
Palani announced his exit in an X post, saying “my latest chapter at Tesla has come to a close.” In response to Palani’s post, Elon Musk replied, “Thanks for an epic contribution over many years!”
Recounting his experience at Tesla, Palani said the company barely survived Christmas of 2008 when he started his journey, just before he had joined its finance team under “Tesla Deathwatch”. “I slept under my desk in San Carlos, CA at least once, and I wasn’t the only one,” Palani wrote in a long post.
Appreciating the commitment of Tesla employees, Palani wrote that while many companies have hardworking employees, “few have the level of commitment and collaboration of the Tesla team.”
Palani also Tesla CEO Elon Musk for his “endless love of humanity.”
“Tesla’s mission is so ambitious and complex that any narrative about the company is naturally an oversimplification,” Palani said to the outside world.
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Who is Sendil Palani
Palani joined Tesla back in 2008 as a Senior Financial Analyst, as per his LinkedIn profile. Over the years, he worked at Tesla in two stints, first from 2009 to 2011 and then from 2014.
In 2014, he joined as a Manufacturing Project Manager and rose through the ranks to become Senior Finance Manager, Director, Senior Director, and finally Vice President of Finance in 2021.
According to Palani’s LinkedIn profile, he holds a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from The Wharton School, along with a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.
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High-profile exit amid low sales
Palani is the latest high-profile executive to leave Tesla in recent years as the company works to deploy robotaxis in more cities and produce humanoid robots. Sales have reportedly declined for 2 consecutive years in Tesla’s core EV business amid sluggish demand in the US, Bloomberg reported.
Other executives who have left the company include longtime Musk confidante Omead Afshar; David Lau, Tesla’s vice president of software engineering; Milan Kovac and the head of engineering for the Optimus robot program.