- A group of investors is asking Tesla’s board chair to guarantee that CEO Elon Musk will spend at least 40 hours a week on Tesla.
- This comes as the CEO has spent months focused on politics, not cars.
- Tesla needs strong leadership, as plunging profits and falling sales are shaking the foundations of the business.
It’s the moment any free-wheeling, flexible-schedule, remote worker fears. One day, the boss lets you know that you’re going back to the office full time. Your days of roaming are over. But what happens when it’s the boss who never seems to be at work? Apparently, the shareholders step in.
A group of Tesla shareholders has finally had it with Elon Musk’s globe-trotting political antics. They don’t care about the Department of Government Efficiency, they don’t care about the Woke Mind Virus and they certainly don’t care about X. They care about Tesla, and its missing-in-action CEO. They’re demanding a change, as The Washington Post reported today.
The Post reports that SOC Investment Group—representing the holders of just 7.9 million of Tesla’s 3.22 billion outstanding shares, so by no means a large proportion of investors—sent a letter to Tesla board chair Robyn Denholm requesting a full-time commitment from Musk. They want the CEO to guarantee the company at least 40 hours a week.
The source of their anger is clear. While we don’t have a true breakdown of Musk’s daily activities, his public-facing persona has been far more focused on DOGE and supporting Donald Trump than on Tesla. That’s despite the company being mired in a variety of crises, from plummeting profits to demand issues and political risks. Meanwhile, the potential repeal of the federal EV tax credit and tariffs on imported parts threaten to make Tesla vehicles less affordable.
The revised Model Y was supposed to boost Tesla sales, but that hasn’t happened.
Photo by: Andrei Nedelea
The hope, it seems, was that the redesigned Model Y would turn things in Tesla’s favor. That has absolutely not happened. Despite it now running at full production speed, it appears that there was never much of a production bottleneck to begin with. Demand is faltering, a problem Tesla has never faced before.
It’s high time. The company’s flagship car and SUV are so old they’re being pulled from many markets. Its new flagship is a divisive flop. Its mainstream cars run on underpinnings that date to 2017, making them no longer far-and-away leaders in the EV space. The Chinese market is struggling, and Europe has utterly lost its taste for Teslas.
The company’s whole optimistic case, then, rides on the allegedly impending arrival of true “Full Self-Driving,” a capability that Musk has been overpromising on for around 10 years. It has been just around the corner since 2016 and, as investors grow uncomfortable, Musk says once again that its arrival is imminent. The company plans to pilot its driverless car service in Austin starting on June 12, albeit at a small scale.
Given that autonomous taxis already exist in multiple cities, it’s hard to imagine the pilot program reversing Tesla’s fortunes immediately. The real promise is that Tesla will eventually roll out true autonomous driving capabilities to its existing fleet of cars. Experts have doubts, but if the company pulls it off it could be a huge deal.
The problem is that Tesla needs to get there. It needs to launch its “new” affordable products—likely a watered-down Model Y and Model 3—get the autonomous pilot program running, then expand true driverless functionality to its fleet at a time when public trust is low and core demand is fading. It needs to do this using two sources of money: Investor cash and profit. Profit fell by 71% last quarter, and the tax credit and tariff woes hadn’t even hit the company yet. That leaves just investor cash, and shareholders are getting antsy.
There’s one thing Elon Musk can do to calm their nerves: Drop the politics, and get to work. But those who have tasted true power rarely give it up voluntarily, so we’ll see what Musk has planned for his next move.
Contact the author: Mack.Hogan@insideevs.com.
