Tesla lured him away from Apple so that the fact that he can’t fit in elsewhere has attracted the interest of the Tame Apple Press.

Lattner had led the software development team in charge of Autopilot. Tesla executive Jim Keller is now in charge of Autopilot hardware and software. The company announced it had also hired OpenAI research scientist Andrej Karpathy, who will serve as Tesla's new director of artificial intelligence and Tesla Vision.

In a statement Tesla said: "Chris just wasn't the right fit for Tesla, and we've decided to make a change. We wish him the best." Lattner tweeted that it turns out that Tesla isn't a good fit for him after all.

“I'm interested to hear about interesting roles for a seasoned engineering leader!"

Lattner is a widely respected figure as the main author of LLVM and Apple's Swift programming language.