Tesla’s head of sales is leaving

Ganesh Srivats, who has been leading Tesla’s sales in North America for the past 3 years and had recently seen his role expand significantly, is now leaving the automaker.

Tesla hired Srivats from Burberry in 2015 to lead sales in North America. As head of sales in Tesla’s biggest market, he oversaw a significant expansion of Tesla’s sales staff and he brought a lot of sale managers from the luxury fashion industry, where he himself came from.

He saw his role expand this year when he became “in charge of developing the North America and EMEA markets, as well as worldwide responsibilities for Tesla.com, digital products, marketing, and other factory-to-consumer activities. He also oversaw the go-to-market launch of the Model X SUV, and the Model 3 sedan – Tesla’s first mass-market EV.”

The greater responsibilities came after Jon McNeil, Tesla’s President of sales and service, left to join Lyft in February.

Srivats effectively became Tesla’s most senior sales executive, but we learned that he went on leave back in April.

At that point, Robin Ren, Tesla’s head in China, took over responsibilities of Worldwide sales.

Sources told Electrek that Srivats wouldn’t be returning from his leave at the time, not unlike VP of Engineering Doug Field, but we weren’t able to confirm it.

A few months later, it has now been confirmed as Moda Operandi, an online luxury retailer, announced that it hired Srivats as CEO.

They wrote in a press release:

Moda Operandi, the first online luxury retailer to provide consumers access to full collections straight from the runway, announced today that Ganesh Srivats has been appointed as CEO, effective August 1st, taking over day-to-day operations from Deborah Nicodemus. Nicodemus has served as CEO for five years and will remain as a close advisor to the company and Srivats. Srivats most recently served as vice president at Tesla, and prior to that, was an executive at Burberry.

There have been a lot of changes in leadership at Tesla lately. The company announced last month that it is slashing its workforce by as much as 9% in a restructuring of the company as Tesla attempts to become profitable by the end of the year.

While many are leaving, Tesla is also still hiring.

After announcing a flurry of new executive hires from Apple, Amazon, and more earlier this year, they also announced a new head of Energy operations hired from Amazon and a new head of Tesla Europe coming from BMW just last week.