- Elon Musk runs Tesla and many other companies at the same time.
- Normally, investors don’t like it when CEOs do this. But they let Musk pass.
- But investors are now raising real concerns about Tesla. Will this force Musk to focus more?
Elon Musk runs Tesla. And Space X. And the company formerly known as Twitter. And Neuralink, the company that makes chips that supposedly go into your brain. And a company that operates a tunnel under Las Vegas. And an AI startup too.
Normally, people who run large, publicly traded companies are encouraged to do just this one thing and are discouraged from taking on side projects. But Musk does his own thing, and for a long time the idea that he’s a guy who does so many things was part of the narrative: Normal people couldn’t pull it off, but Elon isn’t normal.
None of this is secret. Tesla explains this to shareholders in its public filings, where it describes all of Musk’s other jobs.
And this year’s proxy filing describes how some of those jobs overlap: Tesla, for example, spent $200,000 on advertising for the company formerly known as Twitter; and Twitter spent $1.2 million through “commercial, consulting and support agreements” with Tesla – which presumably refers to Tesla staff who have worked at Twitter since Musk bought it in 2022 (although (that Musk has already described some of this work as volunteering). There are also interlocks between Tesla and Space X; and Tesla and Musk’s tunnel company.
And on top of all that, Musk essentially used the fact that he runs other companies to justify his demands for a $55 billion pay package from Tesla – if he didn’t get it, he got it. posted on the social network formerly known as Twitter, he would be tempted to spend more time doing cutting-edge work at one of his other outlets.
And for a long time, everything has been fine. Particularly in recent years, when the market collapsed for Tesla and made it a trillion-dollar company.
Tesla stock price could prompt rethinking of Musk’s role
But now Wall Street is going after Tesla over concerns about demand for electric cars in general and at Tesla in particular. Earlier this month, the company announced its first year-over-year sales decline since 2020 and just laid off 10% of its workforce.
Tesla stock is now down more than 60% from its pandemic-era peak; it has fallen 37% so far this year.
All of this makes me wonder if some Tesla investors will eventually have the courage to demand that Musk spend more time working on Tesla and a little less on at least some of his side projects. Or, failing that, if Musk at least started performatively demonstrating that he’s spending more time on Tesla.
The knee-jerk response here should be: Good luck with that! Musk does what he wants. And it worked very well for the third richest man in the world.
But even Elon Musk sometimes has to accept the world as it is, not as he would like it to be, which is why he was forced to buy Twitter after trying to walk away from a sales deal restrictive.
And if Tesla continues to stumble and its price continues to fall, maybe it will decide it doesn’t need to do so many things at once.
businessinsider
