Robyn Denholm, the chair of Tesla’s board, admitted to the Financial Times that she has had “tough conversations” with CEO Elon Musk over his social media posts and said that if she had her way, Twitter, now X, wouldn’t exist.
“If I had a magic wand, Twitter wouldn’t exist,” Denholm said.
Musk bought the social media site in 2022, and his posting style has long courted controversy — but Denholm defended the billionaire, describing him as a “contrarian” from whom a certain amount of controversy was to be expected.
“He’s a contrarian, and you can’t be a contrarian part of the time, so you’ve got to work with that as a board,” she said.
“I might wake up in the morning and read a tweet that I wasn’t expecting. I don’t wake up to a strategy shift that we haven’t talked about,” Denholm added.
Denholm became Tesla’s chair in 2018 after Musk stepped down following a settlement with the SEC over the billionaire’s infamous “funding secured” tweet.
Musk’s statement that he had secured funding to take Tesla private at $420 a share cost him $20 million in fines and saddled him with a “Twitter sitter,” a company lawyer who must vet any posts about Tesla before he sends them.
Musk has continued to court controversy with his social media activity ever since, attracting criticism last year when he called an antisemitic post the “actual truth” — a move which sparked a backlash from some Tesla investors.
Tesla is currently trying to get shareholders to vote in favor of reapproving Musk’s $55 billion pay package after his ambitious 2018 pay deal was struck down by a Delaware judge earlier this year.
The carmaker is going all out to get the package passed, with The Wall Street Journal reporting that Denholm, who is based in Sydney, plans to travel across the globe to persuade shareholders to vote.
Denholm told the FT that Tesla faced a “huge hill to climb” to get the compensation package approved, having previously called Musk’s $55 billion payday “critical to the future success of Tesla.”
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment made outside normal working hours.
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