Business Reporter, BBC News
Getty imagesTesla denied information that he contacted recruitment companies to launch a replacement for Elon Musk as managing director.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that the board of directors of the electric car company began to seek a successor to Mr. Musk last month.
He said it was due to frustration around Mr. Musk’s concentration on his work in the administration of US President Donald Trump and the course of action upstream of Tesla.
However, in a statement Thursday, Tesla said that the report was “absolutely false” while Mr. Musk wrote on his social media platform X that the newspaper was “a discredit of journalism”.
The president of Tesla, Robyn Denholm, wrote on X: “There was a media report wrongly claiming that the board of directors of Tesla had contacted recruitment companies to launch a CEO search to the company.”
“This is absolutely false (and it was communicated to the media before the report publication).”
She added: “Tesla CEO is Elon Musk and the board of directors is very confident in its ability to continue to execute on the exciting growth plan to come.”
The denial comes after the Wall Street Journal, quoting unnamed sources, wrote that Mr. Musk was informed by the Council that he needed to spend more time on Tesla and that he had to say it publicly.
The newspaper said Mr. Musk had not rejected the suggestion.
Last week, Mr. Musk said at a conference on the gains call “that I will allocate a lot more of my time in Tesla” and I committed to “considerably reduce” his role as government.
Writing on X Thursday, Mr. Musk was strongly critical of the report of the Wall Street Journal.
“It is an extremely bad violation of ethics that the WSJ would publish a deliberately false article and did not include an unequivocal denial beforehand by the Tesla board of directors,” he said.
He then republished a comment from an X user who called “trash” paper.
Protests and boycotts
Mr. Musk’s management on the newly created advisory organization of Trump – the Ministry of Government Effectiveness (DOGE) – has attracted many criticism.
Some Tesla customers say they no longer feel faithful to the brand because of Mr. Musk’s controversial opinions and political actions in charge of Doge.
Some have undertaken to boycott the company while others organized demonstrations against it due to Mr. Musk – in some cases, causing criminal damage to the dealers.
In March, Trump – with Mr. Musk by his side – told journalists from the White House gardens who uses violence against Tesla “would go through hell”.
He then undertook to buy a Red Model-S, one of the many teslas lined up on the White House campaign that day, to support the electric automotive company.
Temporary government employees, such as Mr. Musk, normally limit themselves to working 130 days a year which, if counted from the day of the inauguration of Trump, will end at the end of May.
But we do not know when Mr. Musk, who contributed more than a quarter of a billion dollars to the re -election of Trump, will resign completely.
Trump said last month that he would keep Musk “as long as I could keep it”.
