Musical Chairs: AI Race Led To Key Executive Changes At Apple, Tesla And Meta In 2025
The AI race has caused a musical chairs dance among executives at Tesla, Apple and Meta.gettyMost American workers may be holding on tight to their current jobs, but executives and top researchers at some of the largest technology companies in the artificial intelligence race are not staying put. Some are leaving after failing to deliver timely updates, while others are unhappy with strategic shifts and defecting to competitors. Still others are leaving big companies to join or launch their own startups. Overall, more than four executives or key employees at Apple, Tesla and Meta left this year, often within weeks or months of each other. Forbes broke down why below. Apple Apple has struggled to keep up in the artificial intelligence race this year. From delays in its Apple Intelligence rollout and upgrades to voice assistant Siri, it’s fallen behind its competitors in releasing consumer-friendly features.This has led to the largest leadership shakeup at the company since cofounder Steve Jobs died in 2011. So far this year the tech company has lost its longtime chief operating officer, Jeff Wiliams, who was recently nominated to be on Disney’s board of directors; head of robotics research Jian Zhang; and AI researchers Tom Gunter and Mark Lee, who left for Meta. In December alone, artificial intelligence chief John Giannandrea stepped down amid delays in AI developments; the current general counsel and vice president of environment and policy announced their retirements; and more than a dozen senior executives announced their departures. Chip chief Johny Srouji was also reported to be leaving Apple, but has since denied those reports. TeslaJust days after the board of directors approved in November an unprecedented pay package for Elon Musk that could be worth up to $1 trillion, engineers running programs for Tesla’s top-selling Model Y, Model 3 models and Cybertruck announced their departures. The turnover was a result of Tesla’s shift towards prioritizing AI-powered businesses, like robotaxis and humanoid robots, which is making the company less attractive to auto engineers, a former Tesla executive told Forbes in November. Departures this year so far include: the director of the battery team; the head of Tesla’s “Dojo” supercomputer team; the vice president of North American sales and service; the company’s head of HR; and the head of the “Optimus” robot project. Tesla is not the only one of Musk’s companies that has seen executives leave this year. At xAI, which merged social network X with Musk’s AI startup in March, departures included its chief financial officer and general counsel, both who joined the company just months before leaving. X CEO Linda Yaccarino also left in July. Indeed short stints seem to be a pattern at Musk-owned companies. As one of Musk’s advisers told The Financial Times: “The one constant in Elon’s world is how quickly he burns through deputies.”MetaBefore Mark Zuckerberg went on an AI hiring spree and offered at least two engineers compensation packages worth $1 billion, spread out over years, it was hemorrhaging AI talent. Researchers and engineers that had long worked on the company’s AI efforts left to start their own companies (Perplexity, Mistral and Fireworks AI), while others decamped to rivals Open AI, Anthropic and Google. Over the last two years, Meta’s retention rate for full-time employees was just 64%, compared to Anthropic’s 80% and Google Deepminds’s 78%, according to a May report by VC firm Signal Fire. Still, Zuckerberg's spending spree was apparently not enough to buy the loyalty of new arrivals. By late August, at least two staffers he recruited from Open AI had left, just months after their arrival. Avi Verma returned to his researcher position at Open AI—his brief stint at Meta is not even listed on his LinkedIn profile. As did Ethan Knight, who had joined Meta from Elon Musk’s xAI and also left for Open AI. A third researcher, Rishab Agarwal, left Meta after just five months to work at Periodic Labs, an AI startup that raised $300 million in a seed round by Andreessen Horowitz. But it wasn’t all losses for Meta’s AI team in 2025. Billionaire Alexandr Wang joined the company as chief AI officer in June after Meta acquired a 49% stake in Scale AI, the data annotating company he cofounded. In December, Meta poached Apple’s design chief Alan Dye to head up a new design studio.
