According to a new WSJ report, the soaring, Tesla’s board of directors discreetly started to seek Elon Musk’s potential successor about a month ago, approaching management firms while the car manufacturer faced demonstrations, falling sales and reducing profits while Musk was on the road to Washington to reduce government spending.
The members of the board of directors would have met Musk to express concerns about his divided attention, telling him that he had to spend more time on Tesla and publicly commit to doing so; According to the newspaper report, Musk did not postpone and later told investors that he “allocated much more time to Tesla” from May.
Tesla president Robyn Denholm said in a statement published overnight that he was “absolutely false” that the company had approached recruitment companies. She also said “it was communicated to the media before the report was published”. Musk shared the declaration and argued that it was an “extremely bad violation of ethics”. The WSJ has since said that Tesla had never answered the journalists’ questions.
The work of the Musk government led to the first annual decrease in Tesla sales in more than a decade; This has also tarnished the brand image of the company among some consumers because of its political alignment. The impact was rapid and furious: Tesla’s market value increased from $ 1.5 billion in December to approximately 900 billion dollars.
Despite these challenges, Musk seemed optimistic about the future of Tesla during the call for last week’s results, where the company declared a drop of 71% profits and a drop in income by 9%. “We are not on the edge in tatters of death,” said Musk, investors, “not even near”.
The current status of succession planning remains uncertain, according to the newspaper. This adds that it is not clear if Musk, who has run Tesla for almost 20 years, was aware of the effort.
This story has been updated to include the statements of Tesla and the WSJ.
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