Tesla Loses Third General Counsel in One Year

Elon Musk CEO of Tesla
FREDERIC J. BROWN/Getty

Tesla announced this week that General Counsel Jonathan Cheng will be leaving the company. Cheng is the third Tesla general counsel to leave the company in 2019 alone.

According to a report by Bloomberg, lead Tesla attorney Jonathan Cheng has announced that he is moving on from his role at the company.

The report notes several of Cheng’s accomplishments during his short nine-month tenure at Tesla. Much of Cheng’s work at Tesla seemed to focus on helping Tesla CEO Elon Musk fix problems that Musk himself created. For example, Cheng managed to settle with the SEC after they requested that Musk be held in contempt over a series of business-related tweets that he did not have pre-approved.

It was an eventful 9 1/2 months for Chang and Tesla. He took over from Butswinkas a day after Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk published problematic tweets about the outlook for vehicle production this year. Within a week, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission asked a judge to hold the billionaire in contempt of a 2018 settlement that required him to get social media posts that could be material to investors pre-approved.

Musk and the SEC settled in April. That month, Tesla started waging a legal battle against a short seller it accused of trespassing at its California assembly plant and menacing workers. And in August, Walmart Inc. sued Tesla over rooftop solar fires at more than a half-dozen of the retailer’s stores. The two companies resolved the issue out of court last month.

The report notes that Cheng also helped Musk win a defamation lawsuit against a British cave diver that Musk called a “pedo guy” on Twitter.

Tesla has yet to announced who will replace Cheng. Elon Musk has traditionally avoided outside hiring and instead hired executives from within the company.

Stay tuned to Breitbart News for more updates.

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