‘Personality Cult…’: Tesla Employee Quits After 7 Years, Blames Elon Musk

Last Updated:June 30, 2025, 18:27 IST

In an interview with Business Insider, Trae Cervantes revealed that he could no longer reconcile his personal values with the image his CEO was projecting

Elon Musk’s increasingly visible political leanings and controversial public behaviour are not just making headlines but also shaking the foundations of his own company. Tesla, once a beacon of clean energy innovation, is now seeing cracks emerge from within, as even long-time employees begin to walk away. One such exit is turning heads; that of Trae Cervantes, an engineering technician who spent seven years with Tesla before abruptly resigning. His reason? Elon Musk.

In an interview with Business Insider, Cervantes revealed that he could no longer reconcile his personal values with the image his CEO was projecting. He said that working with Tesla felt like he was compromising his moral values every day. He recounted the emotional toll of staying with a company whose figurehead, in his eyes, had strayed far from its founding mission. “I could not compromise my values,” he told Business Insider.

Cervantes began his journey with Tesla back in 2018, joining the Nevada-based Gigafactory as a production associate. Without any formal college education, he found the company offered rare opportunity – good pay, room for growth, and respect for hard work. The 12-hour shifts were gruelling, but the environment was driven, forward-looking, and deeply tied to a vision of a cleaner, tech-driven future. “Tesla changed my life,” Cervantes acknowledged, adding that it gave him purpose.

But somewhere along the way, that sense of purpose eroded.

Cervantes pointed to a shift in company culture; one that increasingly revolved not around innovation, but around Musk himself. He described a growing “personality cult” inside Tesla, where even moments of controversy, like Musk’s on-camera marijuana use on the Joe Rogan Experience, were turned into T-shirt slogans at the factory. Cervantes kept working through it all, convincing himself that the mission of sustainable transportation was still worth the noise.

That changed when Musk acquired Twitter.

According to Cervantes, the move marked a turning point. Musk’s growing involvement in US politics, including public endorsements, online feuds, and what Cervantes described as “giveaways to court voters”, left him disillusioned. He began revisiting the CEO’s older statements, digging into Tesla’s ambitious but still-unmet promises, particularly around full self-driving technology. The more he read, the more uneasy he felt.

But what finally broke him was a particular video. In it, Musk appears to mimic a Nazi salute, a moment Cervantes said left him ashamed for the first time of where he worked. “I didn’t leave because of the company,” he told his supervisor, but because of “the face that now represents it.”

Tesla, meanwhile, is feeling the fallout beyond just its workforce. Several European companies have reportedly removed Tesla vehicles from their fleets in protest of Musk’s political stance and public persona, seeing him as a liability rather than an asset.

For Cervantes, the decision to quit wasn’t about career growth or corporate culture, it was personal.

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