Tom Zhu: The Hardcore Tesla Executive Who Gets Stuff Done for Elon Musk

Zhu helped put Tesla on the map in China. Now Elon Musk is depending on him to mass-produce its most high-profile new vehicle in years—the Cybertruck—and to crank out new factories to hit an eye-popping goal of making 20 million Tesla vehicles a year.

Tesla's Tom Zhu. Screenshot via YouTube. Photo of Tesla's Cybertruck by Bloomberg. Art by Mike Sullivan.

For Tesla employees, the sight of Tom Zhu’s face early this year around the electric car maker’s factory in Austin, Texas, was a relief.

For months, the absence of key Tesla executives in Austin had paralyzed the multimillion-dollar purchasing decisions required to build out the assembly line for its newest vehicle, a futuristic stainless-steel hulk called the Cybertruck. The company’s CEO, Elon Musk, had been preoccupied with Twitter since October, when he acquired the company for $44 billion. Another key Tesla executive who had overseen earlier factory projects, Omead Afshar, had decamped the previous summer to work at Musk’s other companies, said current and former Tesla employees.