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Comings and Goings

Tesla CFO Jason Wheeler is leaving the company and will be replaced by ex-CFO Deepak Ahuja

Tesla CEO Elon Musk made the announcement on the Q4 earnings call.

AwesomenessTV CEO Brian Robbins is stepping down

Here’s the memo.

The woman who helped build Michelle Obama’s brand is joining Instagram

Kristina Schake is joining Instagram to lead comms, and current comms boss David Swain is leaving after almost a decade at Facebook.

One of Snap’s top ad execs is leaving right before the IPO

Sriram Krishnan, who joined a year ago from Facebook, was a key leader on Snap’s ad tech team.

Alphabet is sending hundreds of staff from its internet access unit to Google

The subsidiary, called Access, also has a new CEO.

WhatsApp has hired its first COO: Facebook exec Matt Idema

Idema will help WhatsApp manage its business ambitions.

A drone software firm has hired two execs from Salesforce and NetSuite

DroneDeploy, a data management platform for drones, has new VPs of engineering and business development.

Lyft has hired the head of Google Street View to lead its mapping team

Luc Vincent, Lyft’s new vice president of engineering, is leaving Google after 12 years.

Molly Graham is taking on a top ops role at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

The $45 billion philanthropic organization is aiming widely, using Facebook stock.

This visual recognition startup has poached AI talent from Twitter

New York-based Clarifai has picked up a former Google Brain engineer and four members of Twitter’s Cortex machine learning team.

Google’s former security chief is retiring from the company

Eric Grosse confirmed today that he is leaving Google after a decade with the company.

Facebook has hired former Xiaomi and Google exec Hugo Barra as its new virtual reality chief

Barra left Xiaomi on Monday. Now he’s joining Facebook.

Dropcam founder and Nest employee Greg Duffy is heading to Apple

The iPhone maker confirmed the hire but won’t say what Duffy will be doing.

Prominent Silicon Valley lawyer Ted Wang is joining Cowboy Ventures as a partner

Wang has already been involved with some of tech’s most promising startups.

LinkedIn’s top engineering executive just got promoted to be Microsoft’s new CTO

Kevin Scott, senior VP of engineering at LinkedIn, is joining its new parent company.

Apple’s head of global retail marketing is going to be Ford’s first chief brand officer

Before joining Apple in 2014, Musa Tariq headed up Nike’s digital marketing.

Trumps’s new FCC chief Ajit Pai wants to abolish net neutrality

Expect serious restructuring at the FCC under Trump.

New York Times editor Quentin Hardy is heading to Google

He announced on Twitter Monday that he will be head of editorial for Google Cloud.

Tesla’s new Autopilot boss wants to ‘accelerate the path to cars being appliances’

Ex-Apple engineer Chris Lattner says he’s an “un-car person.”

Hugo Barra is leaving his post at Chinese phone maker Xiaomi

The former Google executive had been in charge of the company’s international expansion.

Uber has hired two significant Google veterans

Google’s former head of search, Amit Singhal, and the company’s SVP of engineering, Kevin Thompson, will be working together at the ride-sharing behemoth.

Google has acquired most of Twitter’s developer products, including Fabric and Crashlytics

The two sides aren’t sharing deal terms.

The founder of Timehop is going to work at Snapchat

Jonathan Wegener will work on product.

Google is losing an ads star as Margo Georgiadis moves to Mattel

Google’s Americas president is leaving for the second time.

Microsoft’s former head of search got Satya Nadella's blessing before accepting a gig at rival Baidu

Qi Lu stepped down from Microsoft last year, citing health reasons.

To take on Amazon, Walmart is streamlining its retail and web teams

Can the brick-and-mortar retailer become a tech company?

Amazon just poached one of Target’s rising stars to run Prime in important new markets

Jamil Ghani, the SVP of strategy and innovation, is heading to Seattle.

Former Obama campaign adviser David Plouffe is joining Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropy team

Plouffe is officially leaving Uber to join the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

The creator of Swift, Apple’s new programming language, is leaving for Tesla

Chris Lattner is the father of Apple’s app creation tool that debuted in 2014.

Facebook has hired former NBC anchor Campbell Brown to improve its relationship with news publishers

Brown will take over Facebook’s News Partnerships team.

Twitter’s China head says ‘bye’ — adding another top exec departure to the heap as 2016 ends

Kathy Chen follows others out the door of the social communications company.

Genetic testing startup Color Genomics is switching CEOs

CEO Elad Gil is becoming the chairman and co-founder Othman Laraki is now CEO.