Lucid's founder-CEO stepped down; an interim COO took over with no successor named

Lucid Motors builds luxury electric vehicles — the Air sedan and the new Gravity SUV — majority-owned by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund.

Majority owner Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund repeatedly supplied billions through 2024 to keep Lucid afloat until the Gravity launch

Peter Rawlinson joined in 2013 when Lucid was still Atieva, a battery-pack and powertrain developer, and served as CEO and CTO from before its 2021 public listing through twelve years of growth 'from a tiny company with a big ambition'.

Lucid lost $2.7B in 2024 while doubling production plans to around 20,000 EVs in 2025; Rawlinson stepped down as CEO, CTO and board member, with COO Marc Winterhoff named interim CEO and Rawlinson becoming a strategic technical advisor to chairman Turqi Alnowaiser — a top executive at PIF — until February 2027, on $120,000 a month plus a $2M stock grant, a Lucid EV and health insurance.

The interim-CEO structure — no permanent successor, the founder reporting to the PIF chairman — signals the majority owner tightening oversight.

Rawlinson's own framing ('now that we have successfully launched the Lucid Gravity') ties the exit to the product cycle rather than to the missed Air targets.

The compensation details from the regulatory filing make the advisor role unusually specific — monthly pay, a stock grant, a car — showing how carefully the exit was negotiated.

For a company burning $2.7B a year, leadership continuity through the production doubling was the single most watched variable.

Announcing a CEO exit without a successor invites the market to ask who is actually in charge — doubly so when the chairman deciding his access is your bailout fund.

As of the announcement, Winterhoff was running day-to-day operations with Rawlinson sidelined from them, production targeted to double to ~20,000 EVs in 2025, and no permanent successor named.