Investors at Tesla have implored the electric vehicle manufacturer’s board to rein in their wayward CEO after his latest stunt saw the company’s stock tank.
“The board can’t just sit here and watch this go by without saying something and putting guardrails in,” Dan Ives, managing director of Wedbush Securities, a wealth management firm that holds shares in Tesla, told the Washington Post. “I’m hearing from many shareholders that the frustration is hitting a tipping point.”
Other shareholders have gone a step further. James Fishback, the Trump-supporting CEO of the Azoria investment firm, which holds significant interests in Tesla, announced over the weekend he’d be backing out of a new fund focused on the EV manufacturer that’d otherwise been set to launch this week.
“I encourage the Board to meet immediately and ask Mr Musk to clarify his political ambitions and evaluate whether they are compatible with his full-time obligations to Tesla as CEO,” Fishback wrote to Robyn Denholm, the chair of Tesla’s board of directors.
“This creates a conflict with his full-time responsibilities as CEO of Tesla,” he added of Musk’s new political movement. “It diverts his focus and energy away from Tesla’s employees and shareholders.”
Tesla shares had dropped a whopping 7 percent on Monday after Musk spent the weekend tweeting about the supposed launch of his ‘America Party,’ only the latest instalment in his trolling campaign against the White House since leaving the Trump administration’s cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency initiative at the end of May.
The SpaceX founder took a blowtorch to his otherwise cozy relationship with Trump just days after his departure, attacking the president’s budget bill as a “pork-filled” and “disgusting abomination.” The ensuing feud escalated dramatically to the point of Trump threatening to revoke Musk’s government contracts, and Musk accusing Trump of being named in unreleased investigative documents relating to the sex-trafficking probe of Jeffrey Epstein.
Though the pair later backed down, Musk’s renewed attacks against Trump’s bill as it made its way through Congress served only to reignite hostilities, with the president not-so-subtly threatening to deport the South Africa-born billionaire if he didn’t pipe down.
Musk’s weekend announcement of a new political party, which has piqued the interest of MAGA critics as diverse as former Trump Director of Communications Anthony Scaramucci and billionaire Democrat donor Mark Cuban, is hardly the first time Tesla’s stock has taken a pummelling since its CEO defected to the Trump camp last year.
In fact, Axios reports the company’s shares are down by a full 14 percent since the outset of Musk’s feud with Trump earlier in June. Even before that, Tesla’s stock had been performing so dismally amid the mounting public backlash to Musk’s involvement in the Trump administration that Democrats, like Minnesota governor and former vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, had taken to jubilantly sharing snapshots of its market performance with supporters.
The Daily Beast has reached out to Tesla for comment on this story.
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