Tesla Chairman Robyn Denholm said in a recent interview that she is used to seeing unexpected tweets from CEO Elon Musk as soon as she wakes up. "If I had a magic wand, Twitter wouldn't exist," she joked in the interview.
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Musk's provocative posts on the social media site he acquired in 2022 and later renamed X got him in trouble with regulators and governments, as well as causing problems for Tesla's own directors. In January, the billionaire wrote on the platform that Tesla would "take immediate action" to re-register to vote in Texas. Previously, a Delaware court ruled that Tesla's record $56 billion compensation package for Musk was invalid.
That puts the company's board in a tricky position. It must follow proper procedures and set up an independent committee to analyze potential moves. While they ultimately came to the same conclusion, Musk's preemptive tweets made it harder for them to refute the court's finding that they were "lazy servants of an arrogant master."
"Are we going to have difficult conversations about tweets? Absolutely," Denholm said in the interview. But she said, "He's a contrarian and you can't be a contrarian part of the time, so as a board you have to work with that...I might wake up in the morning and read a tweet that I didn't expect. But I'm not going to wake up and see a shift in strategy that we haven't discussed."
Denholm dismissed the idea that her role required her to be Musk's "nanny," saying his actions were outside the scope of her authority.
"To me, the role of the chairman is really to make sure that the board has a good relationship with the CEO and the executive team. We're there on behalf of shareholders to make sure management is doing their job, and their job is primarily to increase shareholder value over time," she said.
Musk's drug use has sparked controversy after he publicly admitted in interviews to taking ketamine and smoking marijuana. But Denholm said media reports that Musk also took LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms at the party, as well as reports that Tesla board members were privately concerned, are "absolute nonsense... I've worked at this company for 10 years and I've never seen any evidence of it."