Lucid Motors said early Monday that Silvio Napoli has assumed the role of Chief Executive Officer.
The move completes an appointment the Saudi-backed EV maker first announced on April 14, when it named Napoli as incoming CEO.
Napoli’s start had been delayed by US work authorization, which the company expected “in the coming weeks” at the time.
Until that cleared, Napoli served as Executive Director and a board member from April 15, while Marc Winterhoff continued as interim CEO.
“On behalf of the Board, we are pleased to have Silvio as CEO at this important stage for Lucid,” said Turqi Alnowaiser, Chairman of the Lucid Board of Directors.
“The Board remains fully committed and focused to Lucid’s long-term future, and we have strong confidence in Silvio’s leadership.”
The First Message
Napoli framed his opening priorities around discipline rather than vision, consistent with the operational mandate the board signaled in hiring him.
“After spending time with our teams and gaining deeper firsthand experience with our products and technology, I’m increasingly confident in our ability to deliver consistent execution and long-term value,” he said.
“Our focus will be on strengthening customer engagement, operating with consistency and accountability, achieving cost competitiveness and streamlining our organization and processes to fully leverage the strength of our team.”
Winterhoff, who led Lucid on an interim basis, has returned to his prior role as Chief Operating Officer and now reports to Napoli.
The role is the same one the German executive held before being named interim CEO in February 2025.
The Outsider Lucid Chose
Napoli is an auto-industry outsider whose career was built at the Swiss elevator and escalator maker Schindler Group, where he served as Chairman and Chief Executive.
The company has emphasized his background in large-scale global operations, financial management and technology-driven businesses.
Lucid‘s board recruited him to bring manufacturing scale and cost discipline as Lucid shifts from low-volume luxury sedans toward higher-volume midsize vehicles.
The appointment ended a search that ran roughly 14 months after the departure of former CEO and CTO Peter Rawlinson in February 2025.
The board is led by Alnowaiser, a senior executive at Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which holds more than 50% of Lucid‘s shares.
A Pay Package Tied to Market Value
Napoli’s compensation, disclosed in an April filing, marks the first time Lucid has structured a CEO plan around sustained market-capitalization performance.
He receives a $1.5 million annual base salary, a target annual bonus of 200% of salary, and a 2026 long-term incentive grant valued at $9.5 million, split between restricted stock units and performance-based RSUs.
The centerpiece is a one-time grant of performance-based stock options over up to 1,000,000 shares, divided into five equal tranches of 200,000.
Each tranche vests only if Lucid sustains a market-capitalization hurdle — set at $5.0 billion, $7.5 billion, $10.0 billion, $12.5 billion and $17.5 billion — measured as a volume-weighted average over 45 consecutive trading days, alongside a time-based condition.
With Lucid‘s market value near $3 billion when the package was disclosed, the first tranche required roughly a 70% increase and the fifth a near-sixfold rise.
The structure contrasts sharply with Rawlinson’s pay, whose reported $379 million for 2022 was driven by SPAC-era stock grants that lost most of their value when the shares later collapsed.
Rawlinson, who led Lucid for 12 years, stayed on after his February 2025 exit as a strategic technical advisor to the chairman, a 24-month consulting arrangement worth about $4.9 million.
The Company He Inherits
Napoli takes over a company still consuming cash heavily as it scales.
Lucid produced 5,500 vehicles and delivered 3,093 in the first quarter of 2026, with handovers disrupted by a Gravity seat-belt recall that halted deliveries for 29 days.
The company has guided to production of 25,000 to 27,000 vehicles this year, a 40% to 50% increase over 2025.
Under Winterhoff’s interim leadership, 2025 revenue rose 68% to $1.354 billion and production nearly doubled to 17,840 vehicles, with deliveries up 55% to 15,841, though the operating loss widened to $3.50 billion, the largest in Lucid‘s history.
The company cut its 2025 production target twice during the year, from an initial 20,000 vehicles to roughly 18,000, and the final total fell slightly short even of the lowered figure after 538 units failed internal validation checks.
Cumulative net losses since 2019 exceed $14 billion.
Winterhoff returns to the COO role on enhanced terms, with his base salary rising to $1 million, a target bonus of 150% of salary, a $5.4 million long-term incentive target, and up to $5 million in additional cash recognition and performance bonuses, part of the latter tied to the same market-capitalization hurdles in Napoli’s options.
The April appointment landed alongside a $1.05 billion capital raise — a $300 million stock offering, a $200 million additional Uber investment, and a $550 million PIF convertible preferred purchase — and an expansion of the Uber robotaxi partnership to 35,000 vehicles.
Lucid‘s near-term roadmap centers on the Cosmos midsize SUV, set to enter production at its Saudi Arabian plant by year-end, as the company targets 100,000 annual vehicle production by 2028 and positive free cash flow by the end of the decade.
The handover also comes as Lucid pushes into Europe, with a Belgian test-drive center opening in early June, and as it works through a run of quality issues that has included multiple 2026 recalls and a high-profile buyback of a software-plagued Air sedan from an automotive YouTuber.
The Saudi facility, built with capacity for 150,000 units a year, is expected to ramp slowly, with the CFO projecting a gradual climb in 2027 before approaching full output in 2028.
The targets follow the three-stage plan Lucid laid out at its March investor day, which set gross-margin profitability and strong revenue growth in the mid-term ahead of positive free cash flow later in the decade.
