Elon Musk has stated on a number of events just lately — on Twitter, from a court stand, on Twitter once more, then again on the similar court docket — that he does not need to be a CEO.
He stated so ahead of and after he was the executive govt of a 5th corporate, which seems to had been one too many, no less than for Tesla shareholders to abdomen. Since April 4, the day Musk disclosed that he’d taken a stake in Twitter, the automobile and clean-energy corporate that accounts for a 3rd of his web value has misplaced about $749 billion of marketplace price.
Taking a Twitter ballot on whether or not he must step down as head of Twitter — and a decisive vote that discovered sure, he must — hasn’t stopped Tesla’s hammering. Overpaying for the social media corporate the usage of tens of billions of his Tesla stocks has confirmed disastrous. It hasn’t helped that Musk has oscillated from arguing that Twitter is doing higher beneath his management, to describing it as within the rapid lane towards chapter, or that he is again and again confident his fans that he used to be achieved promoting Tesla inventory, most effective to then sell off it. extra over and over again.
When will Tesla’s shareholders or board of administrators conclude that sufficient is sufficient? Some are already there.
“As his fanboy, I invested [because] of Elon,” Leo KoGuan, one of Tesla’s biggest individual shareholders, tweeted last week. “Of course, I prefer Elon to be CEO but he abandoned Tesla.”
There’s been no indication Tesla directors feel the same. Several members of the board, including his brother Kimbal, have stood by Musk through it all: the regrettable SolarCity acquisition, the April Fools’ Day tweeting about Tesla going bankrupt, the calling a critic a pedophile.
After Musk made the false and reckless claim he had the funding to take Tesla private, the Securities and Exchange Commission tried to strengthen Tesla’s corporate governance by removing him as chairman and forcing the board to add two independent directors. The effort was doomed from the start — one of the directors added was billionaire Larry Ellison, Musk’s friend and confidant, who left the board less than four years later. He and other directors said nothing publicly about Musk telling 60 Minutes he didn’t respect the SEC, or using the agency’s initials to refer to himself receiving oral sex.
Privately, Ellison and other fans of Musk’s have explained away Musk’s behavior to Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, the senior associate dean of leadership programs at the Yale School of Management. After all, had the professor ever managed to fly rockets into space and land them upright back on Earth?
“It’s true, I haven’t been able to do that, and you have to acknowledge the engineering genius and entrepreneurial will that he has is exceptional,” Sonnenfeld said of Musk in a phone interview. “It’s historic, and the world is, on balance, somewhat better off that it’s on the planet.”
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That said, the Twitter poll Musk has vowed to abide by was just one of the recent votes against him. Last week, Sonnenfeld hosted the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute’s annual CEO summit, where chairmen, presidents and CEOs responded confidentially to questions on a range of topics dominating business news headlines.
Musk didn’t fare well among 100 of his peers: 98% said he overpaid for Twitter; 79% said he’d become a detriment to the value of the companies he runs; 56% think companies should stop advertising on Twitter.
“There have been some standout technological triumphs,” Sonnenfeld said of Musk’s track record. “But we could match each and every one of them with 10 failures that the media looks past because it dangles the new, shiny object and distracts you.”
Where, for instance, are the 1 million robotaxis that Musk stated virtually 4 years in the past could be at the highway 3 years in the past? Where is the Roadster (Sonnenfeld calls it “the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang automotive”) that Musk claimed would be able to fly, packing SpaceX thrusters in place of the rear seats? The CEO showed a prototype five years ago and promised a launch two years ago. It has yet to hit the market.
“Tesla is executing better than ever!” Musk tweeted last week in response to a shareholder who quarreled with him on Tuesday. “We don’t control the Federal Reserve. That is the real problem here.
Investors haven’t been buying that argument, perhaps since Musk has provided ample evidence that he’s preoccupied with Twitter. On the day he fell from the top spot on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Musk dropped in on a Twitter Spaces with Marc Andreessen and other admirers, spending about 25 minutes talking artificial intelligence, his approach to using and running the social media service, the boos he got on stage at Dave Chappelle’s stand-up show in San Francisco, and how much punishment Sam Bankman-Fried deserves.
Tesla didn’t come up until the very end.
“Speaking of Tesla,” Musk stated. “I’ve a Tesla assembly that I’m past due for. I’ve to step off.