Meet the Indian-origin talent driving Elon Musk’s biggest projects

Elon Musk

Elon Musk is known for doing the impossible whether it's building self-driving cars, sending rockets into space, or even trying to fix how governments work. But behind all the big headlines and flashy tech, there’s a group of brilliant Indian-origin minds helping him turn these wild ideas into reality. Let’s meet some of them.

If you’ve ever heard about Tesla’s cars driving themselves, Ashok Elluswamy is the man to thank. Born in Tamil Nadu, Ashok studied engineering in Chennai and later earned a Master’s in robotic systems in the US from Carnegie Mellon University.

He joined Tesla back in 2014 as the very first engineer on the Autopilot team. Since then, he’s climbed the ranks and now leads Tesla’s AI Software division as a Vice President. He helped build Tesla’s self-driving tech from scratch even when they had very limited hardware to work with. Back in 2014, they were working with just 384 KB of memory!

Even Elon Musk doesn’t hold back when praising him. “Without Ashok and our team, Tesla would just be another car company looking for an autonomy supplier that doesn’t exist,” Musk once said. Enough said.

While Ashok handles the tech, Vaibhav Taneja is the man making sure Tesla’s books are balanced and the money keeps flowing. A commerce graduate from Delhi University, Vaibhav joined Tesla in 2017 and became the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) in 2023.

In 2024, his pay package shot up to $139 million, higher than even Sundar Pichai or Satya Nadella. That’s a massive number, but he’s handling some massive responsibilities, too. He’s been key to Tesla’s India plans and is even on the board of Tesla’s India unit.

And in case you’re wondering, yes, he’s the second Indian-origin CFO at Tesla. The first was Deepak Ahuja.

This one’s straight out of a movie. Sanjeev Sharma worked for over 11 years at Indian Railways before moving to the U.S. for higher studies. Today, he’s a principal engineer at SpaceX.

In 2024, Sharma played a key role in one of SpaceX’s biggest achievements: catching the super-heavy booster of the Starship rocket using the launch tower. A feat that sounds like science fiction was pulled off by someone who once worked on trains back home.

His story went viral on LinkedIn, with many admiring how far he’s come. He’s helping build Musk’s dream of reusable space travel, which could one day make trips to Mars a reality.

At just 22, Akash Bobba is probably the youngest name on this list, but don’t let that fool you. A graduate from UC Berkeley, Akash was picked in 2025 to work on DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, an initiative led by Musk to improve how government systems function.

He’s using AI and data analytics to clean up outdated systems. At college, he once rebuilt an entire project overnight after a teammate deleted everything. That same quick thinking is now being used to revamp government operations.

Of course, not everyone is comfortable with someone so young handling sensitive data, but no one questions his talent.

After Musk bought Twitter (now X), things were chaotic. That’s when Sriram Krishnan stepped in to help. A Chennai-born techie who’s worked at Microsoft, Facebook, and Snap, Krishnan joined temporarily to help Musk reshape Twitter’s tech team and content policies.

His time there was short, but impactful. While other Indian-origin executives like Parag Agrawal and Vijaya Gadde were shown the door, Sriram came in to help rebuild.

Today, he’s back at Andreessen Horowitz as a general partner, but his brief stint with Musk’s team showed his ability to operate at the highest levels of Silicon Valley.