(Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal also reported that Afshar left the company, but did not say he was fired.) Afshar first joined Tesla in 2017, where he started as a project manager in the office of the CEO, according to his LinkedIn. Tesla also recently lost Milan Kovac, the VP who headed up the Optimus humanoid robotics team. Kovac said that he left because he needed to spend more time with his family abroad. Musk thanked Kovac in a reply.