Let’s be fair, anyone would be pretty p**sed off to hear it’s being rumoured that your own company are looking for someone else to make the CEO.
So obviously, Elon Musk was raging and had a furious reaction to the recent reports that Tesla was ‘looking for his replacement’.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported last night (30 April) that the electric car-makers had reached out to search firms about a month ago to look for a successor.
This all came as sales and profits were noticeably dropping with Musk having his role in Donald Trump’s government.
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Even the US President took note of this, basically opening up a car sales lot in front of the White House.
But Tesla has now said this report is ‘absolutely false’ as Musk has his own say.
“Earlier today, there was a media report erroneously claiming that the Tesla Board had contacted recruitment firms to initiate a CEO search at the company,” chair of the company, Robyn Denholm, shared on Tesla’s X account.
“This is absolutely false (and this was communicated to the media before the report was published).”
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She added that Elon Musk is the ‘CEO of Tesla’ and that the Board ‘is highly confident in his ability to continue executing on the exciting growth plan ahead’.
In an arguably slightly less official, formal statement, Musk reposted this with his fired-up comment, capital letters and all.
“It is an EXTREMELY BAD BREACH OF ETHICS that the @WSJ would publish a DELIBERATELY FALSE ARTICLE and fail to include an unequivocal denial beforehand by the Tesla board of directors!” he slammed.
During the recent Q1 earnings call, Musk confirmed he would soon be spending more time on running his own companies like SpaceX, Tesla and X, with the time he spends with DOGE to ‘drop significantly’.
The report that he has slammed claimed that board members had met with him and asked that he publicly announce he would spend more time at Tesla.
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While Musk is a member of the board, it was unclear if he was aware of any attempts to find a successor or if that pledge to spend more time at the company had affected the planning for succession.
Yesterday, Trump also said that his senior advisor and de facto head of DOGE could be a part of his administration for ‘as long as he wants’.
He added that Musk had been ‘treated unfairly’ for his role in helping slash the size of the federal government as he said: “You really have sacrificed a lot.”
Jess Battison