President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the de facto leader of DOGE, have been hitting some legal obstacles regarding their government efficiency efforts.
Brandon Bell/Pool via AP
Alexander Simonpour, who has worked at Tesla for several years, has popped up at NASA.
He's scheduled to attend a meeting next week with other DOGE people on NASA's layoff plans.
At least four people with Tesla connections have joined the Elon Musk-linked initiative.
A longtime Tesla engineering manager is on the DOGE team at NASA, according to agency records and two people familiar with the matter.
Alexander Simonpour, an employee of the General Services Administration with a NASA email address, is among those expected to attend a meeting between NASA officials and staff from the White House's Department of Government Efficiency initiative next week where "reductions-in-force" may be discussed, according to the people and records reviewed by Business Insider. He lists several roles at Tesla going back to 2015 on his LinkedIn profile.
His name and work with DOGE have not previously been reported.
Other attendees at the meeting include Riley Sennott, a DOGE staffer whose connections to the initiative were revealed because his Google Calendar was public, and Scott Coulter, who has been named in court documents as being involved with the Trump administration's efforts at the Social Security Administration. Coulter has been listed as a "program specialist" at NASA for weeks, according to agency employees.
Simonpour is at least the fourth person with Tesla connections pitching in on DOGE, the Elon Musk-linked White House initiative to shrink the government workforce and quickly slash spending. Sennott appeared to have interviewed at Tesla, BI previously reported, and a Tesla employee, Thomas Shedd, leads GSA's Technology Transformation Services division.
Antonio Gracias, a longtime member of Tesla's board of directors who is close with Musk, has a Social Security Administration email address, according to people familiar with the matter. His presence at the SSA was previously reported by Bloomberg. Jon Koval, who listed himself on LinkedIn as an employee of Gracias's investment firm, Valor Equity Partners, is also involved with DOGE's work at SSA, according to a record seen by Business Insider.
Tesla, NASA, Simonpour, Gracias, Koval, and Coulter didn't respond to emails seeking comment.
The New York Yankees need help in the starting rotation with Gerrit Cole and Luis Gil injured. They could swing a trade with the Seattle Mariners for a starter.
The New York Yankees need to add a starting pitcher following Gerrit Cole's injury, and it likely won't be Cole's former college teammate Trevor Bauer.
After astronomic levels of hype, the fifth generation of mobile networks has been a letdown for many consumers β and hasn't even made phone carriers much money.
How'd we end up here? What technological choices have held 5G back? And who really benefits from those choices?
Business Insider producer Elizabeth McCauley sifts through the noise of industry reports and marketing and talks to experts to discover the truth.
If you want to check out the sources that informed this video, check out this reading list.
Employees are waiting to hear how JPMorgan Chase will enforce its return-to-office mandate.
They're searching for clues, in one instance sharing a leaked document in a group chat.
Employees also shared info about location and productivity tracking tools.
In a private group chat formed after JPMorgan's January announcement that all employees would be called back to the office full-time, a few hundred people have turned to the forum to air their concerns, vent about the changes, and share tidbits of intel from their respective corners of the bank in a bid to understand to the bank's plans.
The "extremely active" chat gets upward of 100 messages a day, according to one member, a JPMorgan employee of 8 years, who talked to Business Insider. It is one of many Signal chats and Reddit threads that JPMorgan employees are turning to as unofficial "support groups" for employees.
"There's a depressingly small amount of official information within JPMC," they said, expressing their concern about the lack of emails about what's happening. "We have to go find the information, it is not being broadcast."
Last week, a document with JPMorgan branding was shared with the group and caused an instant hubbub, a different member of the chat told BI, which viewed the contents. It appeared to be an outline of steps of escalation for employees who don't meet RTO mandates, including a lower number of non-attendance warnings before possible termination for some.
BI was unable to verify the authenticity of the document or determine who dropped it in the encrypted chat. It is also unclear if it represents current or future bank policy. What is clear based on chat members' reactions to the 6-page outline is that JPMorgan Chase employees are hungry for any clues to how the bank will enforce its 5-days-in-office policy, which began rolling out March 3.
A JPMorgan spokesperson declined to comment on the specifics of the document but said, "If employees are not meeting the expectations, there will be ramifications β just like any other performance issue."
Employees are also eager to understand how their attendance is monitored. Some worry that company tracking methods might not correctly record their hours or productivity β putting them at risk of potential enforcement. Others feel the RTO mandates and attendance recording measures are overkill. The employees were granted anonymity by BI to discuss internal company information without professional repercussions.
One JPMorgan tech VP told BI, sarcastically, that they thought the "babysitting was ending."
People in the aforementioned group chat have been sharing intel about tools for surveilling employee location and productivity. An employee who BI did not speak with shared that their manager had shown them a new tool with a heat map that shows how productive employees are based on the items worked on per hour. A technologist who has direct knowledge confirmed to BI the existence of a tool that tracked productivity per hour. It is unclear how widely it had been rolled out.
"It's impossible to put a number on productivity on a minute-by-minute basis," a software engineer in the group chat told BI. "So much of what we do is about communication, learning, planning, and investing. The only quantifiable measures take weeks to materialize."
JPMorgan said it has "no firmwide heat map that tracks individual production volumes."
"For several years now, we have had a transparent attendance tool that is available for all employees and managers to view and record their time, including vacation days, sick days, work from home, and travel," the bank spokesperson said.
The software engineer and the technologist both described color-coded calendars on manager dashboards that show employees' attendance, highlighting patterns such as requesting to work from home every Friday or calling in sick every Thursday. The chat-group document mentioned such patterns as grounds for managers to open HR cases against workers.
JPMorgan also has a long-standing tracking tool, Workplace Activity Data Utility, also known internally as WADU. While these types of surveilling mechanisms aren't new at JPMorgan, as BI has previously reported, they add tension to an already fraught situation around the return to office.
JPMorgan's RTO roll-out has been met with praise, disdain, and confusion. Bank employees said some offices didn't have enough desks, parking, or conference rooms, and that the messaging felt rushed and unplanned. In its memo announcing the mandate, the bank acknowledged that capacity restraints would mean that some offices aren't yet ready, and are maintaining their hybrid in-office policies, working one or two days from home until further notice.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said in a February interview with CNBC that he's aware this strict policy could result in employees leaving the company and that he's fine with that attrition.
But not everyone who's unhappy about the 5-day RTO is considering leaving the company. Some employees are exploring the possibility of a union and are working with Communications Workers of America, an organization that led the effort of around two dozen Wells Fargo branches unionizing, as BI previously reported.
Tesla's overall favorability in the US hit a record low in YouGov's daily surveys, despite improving among conservative Americans.
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America's overall Tesla favorability hit a low as liberals' and moderates' scores tanked, a survey found.
But the brand's sentiment among conservative Americans has risen, YouGov found.
Tesla's stock price and sales in several countries have fallen in recent months.
The American public's favorability of Tesla has fallen to a nine-year low, a recent survey found.
In addition to Tesla struggling with declining sales in multiple markets and a falling stock price, sentiment among liberals and moderates in the US has fallen off a cliff, recent YouGov surveys found, which were first reported by Sherwood News.
Overall, Americans' impression of Tesla dropped to a score of minus 12.7 on Wednesday, YouGov found β the lowest it's been since 2016, when the firm began measuring US sentiment toward Tesla through daily surveys.
Tesla scored the lowest among liberals, at minus 34.9, with moderates at minus 9.1. By comparison, the average impression score for all automakers was 17.2.
But Tesla's favorability among conservative Americans is up significantly.
Tesla scored 7.6 among conservative Americans on Wednesday, significantly higher than under six months ago, when it scored in the negatives.
It's also significantly higher than where it was trending in 2022, when conservative sentiment toward Tesla dipped as low as minus 6. That same year, liberals scored Tesla as high as 8.7, and moderates as high as 14.
YouGov, a global public opinion and data company, also conducts daily polling for thousands of other major brands. It told Business Insider that its brand perception metrics were impression,value, reputation, satisfaction, quality, and people's likelihood to recommend the brand.
The impression findings come as anti-Elon Musk protests and anti-Tesla boycott efforts have been taking place across several US cities in response to Musk's political involvement with the Trump administration. The automaker has also been the target of a series of vandalism incidents, which have led police to make several arrests in recent weeks.
Musk, whose image is closely tied to the Tesla brand, has also seen his favorability fall in the US, recent polling found.
In a CNN survey of American adults conducted by SSRS on President Donald Trump's handling of the economy, 53% of respondents reported a negative view of the Tesla CEO, while 35% rated him positively. Just over 60% of respondents said Musk didn't have the right experience or judgment to change the government's operations.
Despite Tesla's worsening impression scores among liberal and moderate Americans, YouGov said that overall buying consideration β or the measure of whether a consumer would consider Tesla the next time they're in the market for a vehicle β had remained relatively stable over time across US political groups.
On Wednesday, 8.1% of liberals, 9% of moderates, and 8.4% of conservatives in the US said they would consider buying a Tesla, compared with an average of 10% for all automakers, YouGov found. On the same date in 2022, 11.6% of American liberals, 9% of moderates, and 6% of conservatives said they would consider buying a Tesla vehicle. The year after, 6.8% of liberals, 8% of moderates, and 5.5% of conservatives in the US said they would consider buying a Tesla.
The results align with what some Wall Street analysts have previously predicted: Even if some consumers don't approve of Musk's actions, it may not necessarily stop them from buying the car they want.
But there are signs that Tesla's sales have been affected in some markets, as Tesla sales have declinedΒ in recent months in several countries.
In February, Tesla deliveries were down over 70% in Australia and Germany and over 40% in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, transportation agencies in the countries reported. In the US, Tesla sales declined 11% in January, according to data from S&P Global Mobility, though the electric vehicle giant still maintained its leading market share in the country.
