Tesla’s Fourth Sales Chief In 18 Months Comes From Its Worst-Performing Region

Joe Ward started at Tesla as a logistics intern in the UK back in 2010. Fifteen years later, he’s been handed the keys to the entire global sales operation. The timing tells you everything about where Tesla’s automotive business stands right now.

Bloomberg reported today that Tesla has tapped Ward, its vice president for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, to lead the company’s global sales, service, and delivery organization.

The appointment follows the departure of Raj Jegannathan, who left the company Monday after just seven months in the role and 13 years at Tesla overall.

• The Fact: Tesla has named EMEA VP Joe Ward to oversee global sales, making him the fourth person in this leadership chain since mid-2024.
• The Delta: Ward is being pulled from the region where Tesla’s sales have collapsed hardest: UK down 57% in January 2026, Netherlands down 67%, France down 42%.
• The Buyer Impact: Constant sales leadership turnover signals Tesla’s automotive business is on autopilot while Musk focuses on AI and robotics. Don’t expect aggressive buyer incentive programs or service improvements anytime soon.

Tesla’s sales leadership revolving door spins again

Tesla’s global sales leadership is a position no one seems able to hold for long. Ward is now the fourth executive in this chain over roughly 18 months, following a pattern of departures that has gutted the company’s automotive management.

Here’s the sequence: Omead Afshar, one of Elon Musk’s most trusted lieutenants, oversaw North American sales and manufacturing before leaving in mid-2025. Troy Jones, a 15-year veteran who served as VP of North American sales, departed in July 2025. Tesla then made the unusual choice of promoting Raj Jegannathan, an IT and AI infrastructure executive, to run sales operations. That experiment lasted seven months.

Jegannathan’s background was in engineering, not sales. He rose to VP of IT, AI Infrastructure, Apps, Infosec, and Vehicle Service Operations before reportedly growing closer to Musk and getting tapped for the sales role. His departure, confirmed Monday via Reuters, adds to a list that also includes the program managers for the Model Y, Model 3, and Cybertruck, who all left in November 2025. Software chief David Lau, who ran the department for over a decade, and Milan Kovac, the Optimus robot engineering lead, are also gone.

Tesla did not respond to requests for comment from either Bloomberg or Reuters.

Ward built his career in Tesla’s toughest market

Ward’s path at Tesla is one of the longer tenure stories left at the company. He joined as a logistics intern in the UK in 2010, moved to the Netherlands to run sales administration in 2012, and was named VP for EMEA in 2022, according to his LinkedIn profile. He’s based in Amsterdam.

The irony is hard to miss. Ward is being promoted from the region where Tesla is bleeding the most. European registrations fell 48.5% in October 2025. Germany alone was down 48%. The UK became BYD’s largest market outside China after Tesla’s monthly registrations there dropped to just 511 units in October 2025. Full-year 2025 European sales came in roughly 30% below the prior year, while the broader EV market in Europe grew 26% over the same period.

The early 2026 numbers are no better. January brought a 57% decline in the UK, a 67% drop in the Netherlands, and a 42% fall in France.

To be fair, Ward’s European challenges weren’t primarily a sales execution problem. Musk’s public endorsement of far-right political figures across Europe, combined with an aging product lineup and aggressive pricing from Chinese competitors, created headwinds that no sales VP could overcome with strategy alone.

A Yale University study quantified some of this damage, finding Musk’s political activities cost Tesla between 1 million and 1.26 million U.S. sales from October 2022 through April 2025.

The global picture Ward inherits

Ward takes the helm at a company that lost its title as the world’s largest EV seller to BYD in 2025. The final scorecard was brutal: BYD sold 2.26 million battery-electric vehicles. Tesla delivered 1.64 million. That’s a 620,000-unit gap, and it widened every quarter.

Tesla posted its second consecutive year of declining global deliveries. Q4 2025 came in at 418,227 vehicles, down 15.6% year-over-year and below even lowered analyst estimates. The U.S. market cratered after the federal $7,500 EV tax credit expired on September 30, 2025, eliminating the demand pull that had inflated Q3 numbers.

China hasn’t been kind either. Tesla’s deliveries there fell to a three-year low in October 2025, down 35.8%, while competitors like Xiaomi entered the market with direct Model Y rivals that secured hundreds of thousands of preorders.

EVXL’s Take

I’ve been tracking Tesla’s executive exodus since Omead Afshar walked out last June. Afshar, then Jones, then Jegannathan, now Ward gets the global title. Four sales leaders in 18 months. That’s not a succession plan. That’s a symptom.

The real story isn’t who gets the job. It’s that the job itself has become impossible under current conditions. Musk has made his priorities clear: AI, robotaxis, and Optimus robots. The car business? That’s running on fumes and institutional memory, and the institutional memory walked out the door in November when both the Model Y and Cybertruck program managers quit on the same day.

Ward is a solid pick in one sense. A 15-year company veteran who worked his way up from intern brings credibility and operational knowledge. But he’s inheriting a mess. Europe is in freefall. The U.S. market collapsed post-tax credit. BYD outsold Tesla by 620,000 EVs in 2025 without selling a single car in America.

When we covered Jegannathan’s appointment last July, the choice of an IT executive to run sales raised eyebrows. That experiment is now over. Ward at least has actual sales and delivery experience. Whether that matters when the CEO is actively alienating your largest international customer base and hasn’t launched a new vehicle platform since 2019 is a different question.

My prediction: Ward will stabilize internal operations but won’t move the sales needle. Tesla’s Q1 2026 global deliveries will come in below 400,000 units for the first time since Q1 2023. The problem was never the sales chief. The problem is the product lineup, the pricing, and a CEO who’d rather build robots than sell cars.

Editorial Note: AI tools were used to assist with research and archive retrieval for this article. All reporting, analysis, and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.