Mercedes-Benz confirmed software chief Magnus Östberg is leaving after five years
The executive who held overall responsibility for the MB.OS operating system is going for personal reasons, and no successor has been named.
Mercedes-Benz confirmed that Magnus Östberg, its chief software officer, was leaving the company after five years, the German trade publications ingenieur.de and automotiveIT reported on August 12. Both said the manufacturer gave personal reasons, and both said no successor had been named.
Östberg took the post on September 1, 2021. He held overall responsibility for MB.OS, the vehicle operating system that Mercedes-Benz has been building to connect the vehicle’s separate domains and to draw a clearer line between hardware and software. A global software organization was created under his leadership, according to automotiveIT.
In a statement to automotiveIT, the company said Östberg had decided to begin a new phase of his career after building that organization and taking its work into series production. Neither publication reported where he was going next, and neither named an interim arrangement.
The available accounts differ on detail, and one detail could not be settled. ingenieur.de dated the company’s confirmation to August 12. Other German outlets reported that staff were told earlier the same week and that Östberg would leave at the end of the month; those outlets are paywalled, and the departure date was not carried by either publication cited here.
Mercedes-Benz did not announce the change itself. Its media portal, which lists 6,764 press releases, carried no item mentioning Östberg later than December 3, 2025, and no personnel release among those it published between August 3 and August 16.
Source: automotiveIT, August 12, 2026. First reported by ingenieur.de the same day. This item rests on the two publications named.
Source: automotiveIT · First reported by ingenieur.de