Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Tesla chair Robyn Denholm denied a report that the board was seeking to replace its chief executive Elon Musk in response to plunging sales and a widespread backlash against his alliance with US President Donald Trump.
“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,” Denholm said in a post on the electric-vehicle maker’s account on social media platform X early on Thursday morning.
“This is absolutely false . . . The CEO of Tesla is Elon Musk and the Board is highly confident in his ability to continue executing on the exciting growth plan ahead.”
She was responding to a story published late on Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal, which said the board had contacted headhunters to recruit his successor after growing concerned about the time he was spending in Washington.
Tesla has been rocked by Musk’s political activism, which included backing the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party ahead of the country’s elections in February. The billionaire’s interventions have hit sales in some of Tesla’s most important markets and provoked protests at its dealerships and vandalism of its cars.
First-quarter profit at the carmaker plunged 71 per cent, undershooting even the most pessimistic expectations, and Tesla lost its crown as the world’s largest EV maker to Chinese rival BYD.
Its shares have fallen 30 per cent since the start of the year, wiping more than $800bn from its market valuation.
Last week Musk bowed to investor pressure, pledging to “significantly” scale back his work as head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) — a position originally slated to last into 2026 — and start “allocating far more of my time to Tesla”.
Any move by the board to oust Musk would be seismic given the 53-year-old’s talismanic role at the group and large shareholding. In December, a US judge shot down the board’s second attempt to award Musk a record pay package.
Musk also splits his time across a business empire spanning social media platform X, which he recently merged with his artificial intelligence company xAI, as well as SpaceX and Neuralink.
Musk, who has clashed with members of Trump’s cabinet, has since largely vacated his office near the White House and is advising on Doge remotely, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles told the New York Post on Wednesday that Musk “hasn’t been [at the White House] physically, but it really doesn’t matter much”, adding that she spoke to the billionaire regularly by phone.
