In 2022, Elon Musk made a gamble that rattled his top engineers. The Tesla CEO scrapped the ultrasonic sensors that helped power the company's self-driving technology, and its vehicles began relying entirely on cameras.
No other self-driving car company had attempted anything like it. Complicating matters was the recent departure of Andrej Karpathy, Tesla's director of AI at the time. That left Ashok Elluswamy, then Tesla's head of Autopilot software, to carry out one of Musk's biggest bets.
Lewey Geselowitz, a former Autopilot engineer, said the team spent months training the software to run without the sensors. He recalled Elluswamy huddling inside a Tesla with a group of engineers, driving around the office parking lot. They were testing the system to see whether it would recognize objects in its path, intentionally almost slamming into walls in the process.
It was an example of Elluswamy going all-in to bring Musk's vision to fruition. A year later, the sensors had been removed from all new Tesla builds, leaving the driver-assist tech running solely off a suite of cameras. "It took courage to know that we would be able to figure that out," Geselowitz said.
For over a decade, Musk has promised that self-driving cars are right around the corner. Achieving full autonomy would be the difference between the company "being worth a lot of money or worth basically zero," he's said. More recently, he has highlighted Optimus, Tesla's humanoid robot program, as another key cog in the company's future, estimating that it may one day account for roughly 80% of Tesla's value.
Elluswamy, who joined the Autopilot team in 2014 as a founding member, is front and center for both initiatives.
He oversaw the public rollout of Full Self-Driving in 2022 and became the company's vice president of AI Software two years later. This past June, his team launched Tesla's first robotaxi service in Austin and debuted a ride-hailing service in the Bay Area in July. He has helped lead the Optimus team since this summer, after the departure of Milan Kovac, its former director, three people with knowledge of the shift said.
Tesla secured a permit that allows the company to operate a ridehailing service with autonomous vehicles in Texas. Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images
Reporting on Elluswamy is scant, despite his influence. Though he often posts on X in support of Musk and Tesla and appears by the billionaire's side at AI events and during company earnings calls, he's rarely photographed and appears to have given only one public interview.
Elluswamy did not respond to multiple interview requests for this story.
To shed light on his rise, Business Insider spoke with more than a dozen colleagues, friends, and former classmates of the executive. Many described him as a hard-working and hands-on engineer, with a high risk tolerance and an uncanny ability to understand Musk's vision. They also pointed to similarities between the two men, including their sense of humor and, at times, cutthroat decision-making.
Amid slow growth for Tesla vehicle sales earlier this year and Musk's insistence that autonomous technology stands between the carmaker's success and failure, Elluswamy is at the center of one of Tesla's most defining moments.
'The least sexy part of Tesla'
The Autopilot team is one of Tesla's most secretive. Its staffers are some of the company's highest-paid, and they work separately from most other engineers. Its organizational chart is inaccessible to those outside the team, and team members have little awareness of its structure, three people with knowledge of the team said.
Elluswamy, who is in his late 30s, sits at the top. Like many early Autopilot engineers, he joined Tesla after Musk issued a call in 2013 on Twitter for "engineers interested in autonomous driving."
In a largely Tamil-language interview with the Indian media personality Gobinath Chandran, Elluswamy said he grew up in a middle-class family in southern India, where his father worked at a fertilizer plant. He was more focused on being "cool" than studying, he said.
He studied at the College of Engineering, Guindy in Chennai, graduating in 2009. He "did the bare minimum" to pass his classes and was more focused on robotics competitions, he said. Kishore Sukumar, one of his college classmates, told Business Insider that Elluswamy was "not much of a book learner" and preferred hands-on work.
Elluswamy told Chandran that he once left a job at a power plant equipment company owned by the Indian government because it was "too slow-paced."
"If I do this, after so many years, I'll get that promotion," he said. "That kind of system was very depressing to me."
In 2012, he landed at Carnegie Mellon University, where he studied robotics and worked on a project designed to teach a robot how to play pool using computer vision. While there, he interned at the Volkswagen Electronics Research Lab in California, where he trained vehicles to orient themselves on the road using lane lines.
Selvam Somalraju and Kartik Tiwari, Elluswamy's peers in the robotics program, told Business Insider that students often studied at all hours of the night to keep up with the demands. Even then, Somalraju said, Elluswamy had a knack for leadership roles: Early on, he was nicknamed "the captain."
The program was good training for Tesla's Autopilot team. Emal Alwis, one of the Autopilot team's first members and Elluswamy's former roommate, told Business Insider that the handful of engineers on the team pulled all-nighters and worked weekends within the first few weeks.
They originally worked out of a back room at Tesla's former Deer Creek headquarters in Palo Alto.
"It came from very humble beginnings," Alwis said. "There was active construction going on. There were things falling from the ceiling when they were cutting skylights. It was definitely the least sexy part of Tesla."
The team shipped its first product within the year. Autopilot Hardware 1.0, an early version of Tesla's driver-assist software, was installed on Model S and Model X vehicles in 2014 and officially released in 2015.
During the team's early years, Alwis said there were frequent restructurings. It went through three Autopilot directors in the span of three years, LinkedIn data shows. In their absence, Elluswamy established himself as a leader, Alwis said.
Managing Musk
Alwis said Elluswamy caught Musk's attention within his first few years at Tesla, after he presented the CEO with a program designed to predict a car's future path.
Elluswamy's model was incorporated into the second hardware build, Alwis said. Though a former Autopilot engineer said it was later replaced by a different video training model, it was the first sign that Tesla could collect its own training data and build a model without using outside companies like Mobileye — a key moment in the company's self-driving tech development.
Leading Tesla's Autopilot team isn't just about technical breakthroughs. It also means navigating Musk, including his harsh critiques and tendency to shift course without warning. Several former colleagues said Elluswamy's rise owes as much to his steady hand with Musk as to his engineering talent.
Where others may have burned out, Alwis said Elluswamy was willing to set aside his ego in a way that allowed him to work closely with Musk and climb the ranks.
"He would really focus and lean on his technical background and his academic knowledge and then say, 'Okay, let's embrace that idea and see if it actually makes sense,'" he said.
Another employee who worked with Elluswamy said they regularly saw him reassure Musk, "almost talking him off the ledge." The employee said Elluswamy has a knack for dealing with the pressure.
Geselowitz, the former Autopilot engineer, said Elluswamy was regularly questioned by Musk during his weekly meeting with the team. Even when Musk's ideas seemed unachievable, Elluswamy believed in the vision, he added.
Elluswamy's team has often been at the center of Musk's public statements and ever-shifting deadlines, which have changed so many times that Musk has called himself "the boy who cried FSD."
One current employee said engineers knew Musk's deadlines weren't always realistic. Four former Autopilot engineers said Elluswamy tended to go along with Musk's vision, even if the product had not been perfected.
In 2022, Elluswamy testified during a lawsuit over a fatal Autopilot crash that the company staged a 2016 demo video. Musk asked the team to make a video outlining the software's capabilities, Elluswamy said. "The intent of the video was not to accurately portray what was available for customers in 2016," Elluswamy, who was an engineer at the time, said. "It was to portray what was possible to build the system."
The route was premapped, drivers intervened during demo runs, and the car crashed into a fence in Tesla's parking lot at one point, Elluswamy said. Musk said on social media at the time that the video was evidence that a "Tesla drives itself" and that there was "no human input at all." The lawsuit was settled last year.
One former Autopilot engineer said Elluswamy instructed the team to train Tesla's self-driving software with a particular focus on routes that Musk drove. Business Insider previously reported that Tesla prioritized "VIP" drivers' data in training its self-driving software, including routes to and from Musk's house and Tesla factories.
"It gave Elon an overly optimistic impression of what the software could do, and it made Ashok look good at the same time," the former engineer said.
Musk and Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.
Many of Elluswamy's former and current coworkers described the executive's similarities to Musk, including his "dad-like humor," hands-on work, and ability to make unpopular decisions.
"He is hands-on until it is going fine, just like Elon," said Geselowitz. "As soon as the problem was solved, he's off to the next one."
Elluswamy's responsibilities expanded significantly after Karpathy, the director of AI, left in 2022. A year later, Elluswamy led Tesla's strategy shift as the company transitioned toward an AI-first approach.
Geselowitz said the strategy shift meant cutting some members of the team to prioritize data collection over coding. "He was willing to drop everything the way it had been done to fire some really critical people," he said. "It required completely different people and a completely different workflow."
Like Musk, he said, Elluswamy has a knack for picking out the workers "who are all talk from the ones that do."
When Chandran, the media personality, suggested that Elluswamy and Musk were both driven and smart, Elluswamy agreed. "I think that's why I was naturally able to survive and flourish there — probably because of some similar character traits," he said.
It has paid off. By the end of 2021, Elluswamy was making $300,000 per year and had been awarded a $10 million stock grant, according to an internal company paysheet.
Public records and real estate listings show that Elluswamy and his wife, who also works in the tech industry, purchased a home in Palo Alto last year listed at $4.85 million. They also own a home in Sunnyvale, California, records show, and a property in Pflugerville, Texas, near Tesla's home base of Austin.
The 2021 paysheet also showed that he had 21 people reporting directly to him and oversaw a team of more than 100 people. This year, Elluswamy's role has continued to expand. He took over some responsibilities for the Optimus program, and a portion of the engineers who were building Tesla's AI chip under former executive Pete Bannon began reporting to Elluswamy in August, three people said.
'He stays connected to the task at ground level'
Musk has long said he doesn't want managers; he wants engineers. Elluswamy is a product of that philosophy.
"He stays connected to the task at ground level," Alwis said. "Even when he was taking on a leadership role, Ashok was still individually contributing." Several people said Elluswamy, like Musk, frequently drives prototype versions of Tesla's self-driving software during his daily commute and provides critiques.
Others who worked with the AI director described his willingness to take risks.
Three former Autopilot engineers said Elluswamy often preferred having workers test the software on public roads and test tracks rather than in simulated scenarios. One said that this philosophy meant test drivers performed maneuvers in real-life scenarios to eliminate issues like missing stop signs or red lights, instead of tackling issues in simulations first.
While his style has won him credibility with Musk, who prizes risk-taking and hands-on engineering, Elluswamy and Tesla's self-driving efforts have also drawn criticism.
Some Autopilot test drivers have expressed concerns about the company's methods under Elluswamy, including so-called critical intervention drivers, who say they have been trained to let the software get as close as possible to an accident before taking over on public roads, Business Insider previously reported.
Elluswamy has been named in two lawsuits involving fatal crashes and the marketing of Tesla's self-driving software and has been deposed in at least two lawsuits against the company. (Tesla has generally said that it follows the law, and in two cases where Elluswamy testified, which involved self-driving-related injuries, the company blamed driver inattention.)
In August, a jury ordered Tesla to pay $243 million in damages to the family of a Tesla driver who died in a crash involving Autopilot in 2019. Tesla is challenging the ruling.
The carmaker also faces multiple ongoing federal probes into its Autopilot and FSD systems, including a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration inquiry and a Department of Justice investigation.
"From the beginning, it's always been: Try not to crash," Elluswamy said of the Autopilot team's primary objective during the 2022 deposition.
T. rex and an FSD celebration
One of his most visible successes took place in 2022, when Tesla released FSD to the general public in the US. During a team celebration at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, Elluswamy delivered what three former and current colleagues described as an emotional and rousing speech.
Standing in front of a T. rex fossil with his wife and Musk standing nearby, he thanked the team for achieving a milestone that had often felt elusive.
"So much of the time is spent on the stuff that doesn't work, and then every now and again, we actually do something that's really good, and get attention just for being good, not just for the problems," Geselowitz said.
Musk also had kind words for Elluswamy.
"Without him and our awesome team," Musk wrote on X last year, "we would just be another car company looking for an autonomy supplier that doesn't exist."
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Source: Ashok Elluswamy is the most powerful Tesla executive you've never heard of
