Tesla & Elon Musk deny CEO replacement rumours
On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that “about a month ago,” Tesla’s board got serious about looking for Musk’s successor.” According to the informants, members of the board, which is comparable to the supervisory board in Germany, are said to have contacted several executive search firms “to work on a formal process for finding Tesla’s next chief executive.”
The background is said to have been the falling share price and the annoyance of some investors over Musk’s “White House focus,” writes the WSJ. In addition, members of the board of directors are said to have asked Musk in a conversation to devote more time to Tesla again and to announce this publicly, which Musk did in the conference call after the Q1 business figures.
However, no “current status of succession planning” could be determined, according to the WSJ. However, according to informants familiar with the discussions, the Board of Directors is said to have focussed on a large personnel consultancy.
A few hours after the WSJ article appeared, Tesla publicly denied it. “Earlier today, there was a media report erroneously claiming that the Tesla Board had contacted recruitment firms to initiate a CEO search at the company. This is absolutely false (and this was communicated to the media before the report was published),” the company wrote in a social media post, which was attributed to Robyn Denholm, Chair of the Board of Directors. This was also communicated to the medium before the report was published. “The CEO of Tesla is Elon Musk and the Board is highly confident in his ability to continue executing on the exciting growth plan ahead.”
In response to the Tesla post, Musk also commented personally a short time later, a bit less diplomatically than the message from the Board of Directors. “It is an EXTREMELY BAD BREACH OF ETHICS that the @WSJ would publish a DELIBERATELY FALSE ARTICLE and fail to include an unequivocal denial beforehand by the Tesla board of directors!”
The Wall Street Journal writes that it did not receive a statement from Tesla before publication, and that “Hours after this article was published, Tesla issued a denial on X. Musk also criticized the article in a post on X.”
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