Latest news with #Kuang
Sydney Morning Herald
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
The cult author who refuses to play by the book world's rules
For Rebecca F. Kuang, the easiest way to resist the internet is to carry a phone that won't cooperate. It doesn't glow, buzz, or beg for her attention – and she prefers it that way. It's a statement of defiance against the glowing promise that apps would make us more connected and productive. Instead, Kuang says, they've shredded attention spans and left us more alone than ever. 'My phone's basically a brick. It can't access most apps,' she says. 'People can't send me TikTok links. I can never see them. Of course, a lot of stuff is going to get caught in the net, but on the whole, it's great because I spend so much more time reading and writing and cooking and being grounded in the world around me and very little time online.' No X, no TikTok, no doom spiral of headlines – a notable abstinence, given the starring role the internet played in her bestselling 2023 novel Yellowface, a razor-edged literary satire about a struggling white writer who swipes the manuscript and identity of her dead Chinese friend, only to face the wrath of the online mob. 'That was my internet novel. It was really me getting the internet out of my system. I'm actually pretty extreme about digital minimalism,' Kuang, who publishes as R.F. Kuang, says. 'I knew I was never going to write a book like Yellowface again because that just was not a sustainable way for me to be in the world, so I felt like this freedom to do whatever I wanted with the next book. It will probably appeal to a different set of readers, and that's exciting to me, like I'm tired of talking about Yellowface.' Kuang is in her husband Bennett Eckert-Kuang's study in their Boston home when we speak over video – not her natural habitat. Enclosed spaces, she explains, feel stifling; she prefers to work somewhere open, where the air can move and the light can spill in. But today, the fading light cuts across her face, artfully preparing us for the shadows of her new novel. If you haven't read Yellowface, you've almost certainly seen it – the bold, winking yellow cover staring back at you from bookshop tables and BookTok. Inside, Kuang skewers the publishing industry and the chronically online mindset with a scalpel and a smirk: taking on how technology has rewired the way we consume art, perform outrage, and weaponise accountability. It's been optioned for a scripted television series with Karyn Kusama (The Invitation, Yellowjackets, Girlfight) attached to direct. While Yellowface was strikingly topical and opened the door to a wider readership, Kuang had already been forging her path through the searing landscapes of historical fantasy with The Poppy War trilogy (2018–2020) and Babel (2022). Drawing on mid-20th-century Chinese history and begun when she was just 19, The Poppy War was no overnight success – Kuang admits she initially felt 'sick to my stomach' every time she thought about sales – but word of mouth gradually built momentum. Meanwhile, Babel, set in 1830s England, became a BookTok hit. This steady rise meant, Kuang says, the sudden attention from Yellowface never 'messed me up'. As she critiqued publishing's pigeonholing of authors in Yellowface, Kuang herself refuses to be confined by genre or expectation. Almost as soon as she penned the novel, Kuang admits she was bored with the frenetic, internet-fuelled tone that is omnipresent in today's literary landscape – eager instead to explore new territories, both thematically and stylistically, in her work. 'I feel like I'm still very young, and I want room to grow, so to be typecast now would feel stifling and murderous to me,' she says. 'I think there is this sort of resistant delight to defying categorisation because when you are pretty overtly racialised or gendered, as so many people are, you do always want to be acting out against expectation. 'That resentment of expectation is not what drives me. It's just something I find psychologically interesting about myself. What drives me is wanting to evolve as an artist with every project.' I think it never got to my head or messed me up because I'm really good at moving on to the next project. She's also grown wary of publishing's other obsession – youth. In a recent piece for Time headlined Olivia Rodrigo and the Impossible Pressure to Stay a Prodigy, Kuang, 29, reflects on the pressure of being 'young' in the literary world. The scepticism that has met her, the interest in her age rather than work, and the anxiety that the apex of her career might have come and gone. 'It's really stupid, I think, that we are so obsessed with young authors in literature. Literature is one of the one things that you only get better at as you get older,' Kuang says. 'I hope I'm not in my prime. I hope that my prime is decades away.' Kuang might not realise it yet, given her self-imposed social media ban, but her readers are already gearing up for her sixth novel out this month. Roll your eyes at BookTokers if you like, but they're busily assembling reading lists heavy with Homer, Virgil, Ovid, and Dante as they prepare for the release of Katabasis – a richly layered, genre-bending dive into the underworld. (The title comes from the Greek word meaning 'descent'). In Katabasis, Cambridge doctoral student Alice Law and her nemesis Peter Murdoch wield pentagram magic to descend into the Eight Courts of Hell, all in a desperate bid to rescue their professor's soul – without him, their crucial recommendation letter is lost. The novel deftly plays with the classical stages of the underworld journey – the descent, the ordeal, and the return (anabasis) – while tipping its hat to Alice in Wonderland, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and even drawing from the surreal dreamscapes of Dali. If you're counting subgenres, it's a clever mashup of dark academia and historical fantasy, with an enemies-to-lovers twist. And while this might seem underworlds apart from Yellowface, Kuang is as critical as ever, cutting through the pretension, privilege, and politics of academia. If Babel's Oxford setting allowed an examination of the institution's historical role as a facilitator of imperial projects, Katabasis focuses on the interpersonal – the inflated egos, the skewed priorities and values, and the fraught, often toxic, relationships between students and teachers. 'I think of them as a duology that deals with why I love the academy so much and can't step away but why I am increasingly uncomfortable with it,' Kuang says, perfectly placed to say so, having roamed some of the world's most elite academic halls. From her undergraduate years at Georgetown University to graduate degrees at Cambridge and Oxford, she's now teaching and finishing a PhD in sinology at Yale. Her research spans Chinese-language literature and Asian American writing, focusing on Chinese American and Chinese diaspora authors and their explorations of travel, language, geography, and storytelling. Kuang – who was born in Guangzhou, China, moved with her parents to Dallas, Texas, when she was four – grew up in a household that valued literature highly and was always drawn to fantasy. She started her PhD the same year as her husband, who's pursuing philosophy at MIT, started his. They recently celebrated their first anniversary. While some couples spend their evenings arguing over whether a potato is too far gone to cook for dinner, theirs seems to involve lively debates on logic paradoxes and the quirks of rational decision-making, conversations about which inspired Katabasis. 'I just fell in love with the idea of logic paradoxes, especially paradoxes of rational decision-making, which feels very pertinent to how we live our lives,' Kuang says. 'There are so many paradoxes where you make a series of decisions that seem like you're better off at every stage, and then suddenly you find yourself in a far worse position than you anticipated, with no way to claw out of it. And that seemed like a lovely way to describe being in a PhD program.' Kuang's academic and creative worlds have never been separate – they flow into one another. Her novels are set on campuses or in educational institutions, and weave in her scholarly pursuits. Her advisors often remind her to rein in her signature point of view, reminding her she's writing an essay, not fiction. 'I find it very difficult to keep the creative voice from seeping into my academic work. I'm always having conversations with my advisor about how my academic writing needs to be a little less opinionated and have a little less of that spunk and flair that I like to bring to my fiction prose.' Having reached new heights after Yellowface, Kuang could now write full-time. When asked why she hasn't stepped away from academia, the answer is simple: 'I like it.' I feel like I'm still very young, and I want room to grow, so to be typecast now would feel stifling and murderous to me. 'I wish I had a more sophisticated answer than that, but I think I'm in a lucky position where I have multiple career options. I could be a full-time author, I could be a full-time academic, and I just enjoy both too much to give either of them up. I always tell myself, the moment it stops being engaging, I'll step away,' Kuang says. 'For all that is frustrating and broken about academia, I'm still committed to this core promise of inquiry and curiosity and sharing it with others, and I do still regularly feel that when I step into a classroom.' She didn't feel the weight of expectation after Yellowface – no sudden compulsion to chase its sharp success or bottle its biting style. Instead, she slipped quietly into her next chapter, boarding a flight to Taipei to plunge straight into research for a new book. 'I think it never got to my head or messed me up because I'm really good at moving on to the next project,' she says. 'I never enjoy doing the same thing twice. I get bored really easily and I don't like feeling like I'm repeating myself. I just like jumping down new rabbit holes and seeing who's going to follow me there.' Loading Her next novel, Taipei Story, is a coming-of-age story about language, family, and grief. She says it takes inspiration from novelists Elif Batuman, Sally Rooney and Patricia Lockwood, and follows a student spending a summer in Taipei studying Chinese while wrestling with questions of identity and belonging. It's a clear break from fantasy, and she's relishing the stylistic stretch. Writing, however, has only grown trickier. Taipei Story has been through several drafts – each one a meticulous autopsy of every word, comma, and cadence. Kuang is merciless with herself as she works through them. 'I hate every single word I put down,' she says. But this isn't a crisis of confidence. Kuang says her reading has sharpened, her standards have risen, and now her prose has to keep pace. 'When my writing feels hardest, the results are often the most rewarding,' she says. 'It's not that I've gotten worse as a writer, it's that I've gotten better as a reader, and now I need my writing to catch up.' If her personal katabasis means crawling through literary darkness searching for the good stuff, then the rest of us might as well switch our phones to silent and go with her. In myth, the hero returns.
The Age
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
The cult author who refuses to play by the book world's rules
For Rebecca F. Kuang, the easiest way to resist the internet is to carry a phone that won't cooperate. It doesn't glow, buzz, or beg for her attention – and she prefers it that way. It's a statement of defiance against the glowing promise that apps would make us more connected and productive. Instead, Kuang says, they've shredded attention spans and left us more alone than ever. 'My phone's basically a brick. It can't access most apps,' she says. 'People can't send me TikTok links. I can never see them. Of course, a lot of stuff is going to get caught in the net, but on the whole, it's great because I spend so much more time reading and writing and cooking and being grounded in the world around me and very little time online.' No X, no TikTok, no doom spiral of headlines – a notable abstinence, given the starring role the internet played in her bestselling 2023 novel Yellowface, a razor-edged literary satire about a struggling white writer who swipes the manuscript and identity of her dead Chinese friend, only to face the wrath of the online mob. 'That was my internet novel. It was really me getting the internet out of my system. I'm actually pretty extreme about digital minimalism,' Kuang, who publishes as R.F. Kuang, says. 'I knew I was never going to write a book like Yellowface again because that just was not a sustainable way for me to be in the world, so I felt like this freedom to do whatever I wanted with the next book. It will probably appeal to a different set of readers, and that's exciting to me, like I'm tired of talking about Yellowface.' Kuang is in her husband Bennett Eckert-Kuang's study in their Boston home when we speak over video – not her natural habitat. Enclosed spaces, she explains, feel stifling; she prefers to work somewhere open, where the air can move and the light can spill in. But today, the fading light cuts across her face, artfully preparing us for the shadows of her new novel. If you haven't read Yellowface, you've almost certainly seen it – the bold, winking yellow cover staring back at you from bookshop tables and BookTok. Inside, Kuang skewers the publishing industry and the chronically online mindset with a scalpel and a smirk: taking on how technology has rewired the way we consume art, perform outrage, and weaponise accountability. It's been optioned for a scripted television series with Karyn Kusama (The Invitation, Yellowjackets, Girlfight) attached to direct. While Yellowface was strikingly topical and opened the door to a wider readership, Kuang had already been forging her path through the searing landscapes of historical fantasy with The Poppy War trilogy (2018–2020) and Babel (2022). Drawing on mid-20th-century Chinese history and begun when she was just 19, The Poppy War was no overnight success – Kuang admits she initially felt 'sick to my stomach' every time she thought about sales – but word of mouth gradually built momentum. Meanwhile, Babel, set in 1830s England, became a BookTok hit. This steady rise meant, Kuang says, the sudden attention from Yellowface never 'messed me up'. As she critiqued publishing's pigeonholing of authors in Yellowface, Kuang herself refuses to be confined by genre or expectation. Almost as soon as she penned the novel, Kuang admits she was bored with the frenetic, internet-fuelled tone that is omnipresent in today's literary landscape – eager instead to explore new territories, both thematically and stylistically, in her work. 'I feel like I'm still very young, and I want room to grow, so to be typecast now would feel stifling and murderous to me,' she says. 'I think there is this sort of resistant delight to defying categorisation because when you are pretty overtly racialised or gendered, as so many people are, you do always want to be acting out against expectation. 'That resentment of expectation is not what drives me. It's just something I find psychologically interesting about myself. What drives me is wanting to evolve as an artist with every project.' I think it never got to my head or messed me up because I'm really good at moving on to the next project. She's also grown wary of publishing's other obsession – youth. In a recent piece for Time headlined Olivia Rodrigo and the Impossible Pressure to Stay a Prodigy, Kuang, 29, reflects on the pressure of being 'young' in the literary world. The scepticism that has met her, the interest in her age rather than work, and the anxiety that the apex of her career might have come and gone. 'It's really stupid, I think, that we are so obsessed with young authors in literature. Literature is one of the one things that you only get better at as you get older,' Kuang says. 'I hope I'm not in my prime. I hope that my prime is decades away.' Kuang might not realise it yet, given her self-imposed social media ban, but her readers are already gearing up for her sixth novel out this month. Roll your eyes at BookTokers if you like, but they're busily assembling reading lists heavy with Homer, Virgil, Ovid, and Dante as they prepare for the release of Katabasis – a richly layered, genre-bending dive into the underworld. (The title comes from the Greek word meaning 'descent'). In Katabasis, Cambridge doctoral student Alice Law and her nemesis Peter Murdoch wield pentagram magic to descend into the Eight Courts of Hell, all in a desperate bid to rescue their professor's soul – without him, their crucial recommendation letter is lost. The novel deftly plays with the classical stages of the underworld journey – the descent, the ordeal, and the return (anabasis) – while tipping its hat to Alice in Wonderland, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and even drawing from the surreal dreamscapes of Dali. If you're counting subgenres, it's a clever mashup of dark academia and historical fantasy, with an enemies-to-lovers twist. And while this might seem underworlds apart from Yellowface, Kuang is as critical as ever, cutting through the pretension, privilege, and politics of academia. If Babel's Oxford setting allowed an examination of the institution's historical role as a facilitator of imperial projects, Katabasis focuses on the interpersonal – the inflated egos, the skewed priorities and values, and the fraught, often toxic, relationships between students and teachers. 'I think of them as a duology that deals with why I love the academy so much and can't step away but why I am increasingly uncomfortable with it,' Kuang says, perfectly placed to say so, having roamed some of the world's most elite academic halls. From her undergraduate years at Georgetown University to graduate degrees at Cambridge and Oxford, she's now teaching and finishing a PhD in sinology at Yale. Her research spans Chinese-language literature and Asian American writing, focusing on Chinese American and Chinese diaspora authors and their explorations of travel, language, geography, and storytelling. Kuang – who was born in Guangzhou, China, moved with her parents to Dallas, Texas, when she was four – grew up in a household that valued literature highly and was always drawn to fantasy. She started her PhD the same year as her husband, who's pursuing philosophy at MIT, started his. They recently celebrated their first anniversary. While some couples spend their evenings arguing over whether a potato is too far gone to cook for dinner, theirs seems to involve lively debates on logic paradoxes and the quirks of rational decision-making, conversations about which inspired Katabasis. 'I just fell in love with the idea of logic paradoxes, especially paradoxes of rational decision-making, which feels very pertinent to how we live our lives,' Kuang says. 'There are so many paradoxes where you make a series of decisions that seem like you're better off at every stage, and then suddenly you find yourself in a far worse position than you anticipated, with no way to claw out of it. And that seemed like a lovely way to describe being in a PhD program.' Kuang's academic and creative worlds have never been separate – they flow into one another. Her novels are set on campuses or in educational institutions, and weave in her scholarly pursuits. Her advisors often remind her to rein in her signature point of view, reminding her she's writing an essay, not fiction. 'I find it very difficult to keep the creative voice from seeping into my academic work. I'm always having conversations with my advisor about how my academic writing needs to be a little less opinionated and have a little less of that spunk and flair that I like to bring to my fiction prose.' Having reached new heights after Yellowface, Kuang could now write full-time. When asked why she hasn't stepped away from academia, the answer is simple: 'I like it.' I feel like I'm still very young, and I want room to grow, so to be typecast now would feel stifling and murderous to me. 'I wish I had a more sophisticated answer than that, but I think I'm in a lucky position where I have multiple career options. I could be a full-time author, I could be a full-time academic, and I just enjoy both too much to give either of them up. I always tell myself, the moment it stops being engaging, I'll step away,' Kuang says. 'For all that is frustrating and broken about academia, I'm still committed to this core promise of inquiry and curiosity and sharing it with others, and I do still regularly feel that when I step into a classroom.' She didn't feel the weight of expectation after Yellowface – no sudden compulsion to chase its sharp success or bottle its biting style. Instead, she slipped quietly into her next chapter, boarding a flight to Taipei to plunge straight into research for a new book. 'I think it never got to my head or messed me up because I'm really good at moving on to the next project,' she says. 'I never enjoy doing the same thing twice. I get bored really easily and I don't like feeling like I'm repeating myself. I just like jumping down new rabbit holes and seeing who's going to follow me there.' Loading Her next novel, Taipei Story, is a coming-of-age story about language, family, and grief. She says it takes inspiration from novelists Elif Batuman, Sally Rooney and Patricia Lockwood, and follows a student spending a summer in Taipei studying Chinese while wrestling with questions of identity and belonging. It's a clear break from fantasy, and she's relishing the stylistic stretch. Writing, however, has only grown trickier. Taipei Story has been through several drafts – each one a meticulous autopsy of every word, comma, and cadence. Kuang is merciless with herself as she works through them. 'I hate every single word I put down,' she says. But this isn't a crisis of confidence. Kuang says her reading has sharpened, her standards have risen, and now her prose has to keep pace. 'When my writing feels hardest, the results are often the most rewarding,' she says. 'It's not that I've gotten worse as a writer, it's that I've gotten better as a reader, and now I need my writing to catch up.' If her personal katabasis means crawling through literary darkness searching for the good stuff, then the rest of us might as well switch our phones to silent and go with her. In myth, the hero returns.
Mint
27-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Mint
In Katabasis, R.F. Kuang serves dark academia as literal hell
Dark academia is a sub-genre in fantasy fiction, often involving schools of magic, secret societies and evil experiments in the backdrop of a scholarly environment. But the darkest of dark academia novels is not fantasy at all—in Donna Tartt's The Secret History, the darkness comes not from magic but from human frailty. R.F. Kuang's much-awaited novel Katabasis (HarperCollins India) has much in common with Tartt's—ambitious, jealous, secretive academics; classical allusions; a growing grimness. But it's a hardcore fantasy novel that does something daring: it takes dark academia to its logical conclusion, literal hell. 'I am getting close to the end of a draft of 'Katabasis,' which comes out in 2025. It's another fantasy novel…," Kuang had told The Harvard Crimson back in 2023. 'It started as this cute, silly adventure novel about like, 'Haha, academia is hell.' And then I was writing it and I was like, 'Oh, no, academia is hell.'" Even without this useful cue card, I could tell that's where this novel—part satire, part adventure tale—was going with within a few pages. Set in an alternate universe where magic is an acknowledged though increasingly suspect force, Katabasis (which, in Greek mythology, refers to a hero's descent into the underworld) begins in Cambridge University, which has a department of 'analytic magick" ruled over by the talented and somewhat unscrupulous Professor Jacob Grimes. When Professor Grimes dies a gruesome death during a magical experiment, his PhD students Alice Law and Peter Murdoch decide to perform some forbidden and extremely risky magic of their own to descend into hell and fetch their adviser—so that he can sign their recommendation letters. This is not as far-fetched as it sounds—finishing a PhD, a culmination of years of tedium and insanely hard work, can seem like a matter of life and death to those brave enough to aim for it—and students of analytic magick have the added pressure of needing to find their footing in a world that scorns their discipline (like, say, students of literature in the real world today). Kuang does not shy away from drawing attention to the absurdity inherent in the situation. The most esoteric and philosophical descriptions of magic are bookended by ruminations on what the actual practice of it in academia entails—publishing papers, squabbling with peers for conference seats, vying for fellowships, gossip, backbiting and bitchiness. 'Success in this field demanded a forceful, single-minded capacity for self-delusion. Alice could tip over her world and construct planks of belief from nothing. She believed that finite quantities would never run out, that time could loop back on itself, and that any damage could be repaired," writes Kuang. In the same breath, she adds: 'She believed that academia was a meritocracy, that hard work was its own reward… that department pettiness could not touch you, so long as you kept your head down and did not complain." Talk about being delulu. It is an immutable law of fantasy novels that no matter how absurd the premise sounds, notwithstanding what the fantastic elements are an allegory of, the narrative has to be convincing enough for the reader to be enthralled by the hero's journey. We know that the predicaments Swift's Gulliver finds himself in are stand-ins for the evils in British society and politics, but we still care what happens to Gulliver. Susanna Clarke's astounding Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is a send-up of Victorian-era social structures, but it has edge-of-the-seat tension. Katabasis pulls this off, but only to a certain extent. It reminded me a few times of Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder, a treatise on the history of philosophy thinly veiled as a novel, in which the stakes never quite feel high enough—though Sophie, like Alice in Katabasis (and her namesake from Lewis Carroll's work, signposted by the author early), have many thrilling adventures and near-escapes. Still, Kuang has dreamt up a fresh version of hell that feels both unfamiliar and not. Spoiler alert: it manifests itself to Alice and Peter as a university, with its eight courts or circles representing one aspect of academia: a sinister library that initially seems enchanting but is ultimately an exercise in tedium, a student residence with continuous, mind-numbing sex, and so on. Our protagonists chart hell using the accounts of Dante, Orpheus and, in an admirable intellectual stretch, T.S. Eliot—Kuang posits that The Wasteland is basically a description of hell—taking them as literal descriptions rather than allegory. The book is endlessly inventive, much like Kuang's most celebrated novel, Babel, again an epic fantasy about a group of magicians in an alternate Oxford that is ultimately a critique of colonialism. Kuang is a very skilled writer who can layer these multiple, complex themes and narratives into coherent plots (though sometimes at the cost of character ) that are immensely readable and fun in spite of their length and denseness. Still, her best work, according to me, is the relatively slighter Yellowface, a contemporary novel about publishing that satirises the industry's penchant for trending ideas and themes. It is her most self-aware work, in a way that doesn't draw attention to its cleverness like Babel and Katabasis often do. Read this genre-defying, intellectually stimulating and often weird novel for its story, then, especially the glimpses of life before hell for its protagonists when they grapple with more mundane challenges than crossing a river of eternal oblivion. Hell is other people, said Sartre. No, hell is a college, says Kuang. The novel is forthcoming in August.
Time of India
28-06-2025
- Automotive
- Time of India
Tesla hires former Cruise executive as AI director
Tesla has hired former Cruise executive, Henry Kuang , as the automaker's AI director, according to a report by news website Electrek on Thursday, as the company looks to expand robotaxi operations in the United States. Kuang was the head of autonomy at General Motors' self-driving unit, Cruise, till last year, according to his LinkedIn profile. His appointment comes at a time when Tesla has seen a series of high-profile departures in the past year, including the resignation of two senior executives on Thursday. Tesla did not immediately respond to Reuters' request for comment, while Kuang could not be reached. While Kuang's role at Tesla is not clear, Ashok Elluswamy, who was the first engineer hired for Tesla's Autopilot team in 2014, has largely been leading the company's self-driving initiatives. Omead Afshar, a top Tesla executive and longtime Elon Musk confidant, left the electric-vehicle maker along with North America HR Director Jenna Ferrua, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters on Thursday. Tesla is going through sweeping company-wide restructuring, during which the electric vehicle maker has laid off thousands of employees and shifted its strategic focus toward AI-driven self-driving technology and robotics. The company rolled out a small batch of its Model Y robotaxis in Austin, Texas on June 22, ferrying paying passengers in a small area of the city and CEO Elon Musk has pledged to expand into several U.S. cities by next year. Musk said last month Tesla will deliver its first car autonomously from factory to customer in June. General Motors said earlier this year that it had completed the full acquisition of its Cruise business to focus on developing the autonomous technology for personal vehicles, not robotaxis.
Time of India
27-06-2025
- Automotive
- Time of India
Tesla hires former Cruise executive as AI director: Report
Tesla has hired former Cruise executive, Henry Kuang , as the automaker's AI director, according to a report by news website Electrek on Thursday, as the company looks to expand robotaxi operations in the United was the head of autonomy at General Motors' self-driving unit, Cruise, till last year, according to his LinkedIn appointment comes at a time when Tesla has seen a series of high-profile departures in the past year, including the resignation of two senior executives on did not immediately respond to Reuters' request for comment, while Kuang could not be Kuang's role at Tesla is not clear, Ashok Elluswamy, who was the first engineer hired for Tesla's Autopilot team in 2014, has largely been leading the company's self-driving Afshar, a top Tesla executive and longtime Elon Musk confidant, left the electric-vehicle maker along with North America HR Director Jenna Ferrua, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters on is going through sweeping company-wide restructuring, during which the electric vehicle maker has laid off thousands of employees and shifted its strategic focus toward AI-driven self-driving technology and company rolled out a small batch of its Model Y robotaxis in Austin, Texas on June 22, ferrying paying passengers in a small area of the city and CEO Elon Musk has pledged to expand into several U.S. cities by next said last month Tesla will deliver its first car autonomously from factory to customer in Motors said earlier this year that it had completed the full acquisition of its Cruise business to focus on developing the autonomous technology for personal vehicles, not robotaxis.
