Tesla's Board Swears It’s Not Breaking Up With Elon... Yet

Board chair Robyn Denholm denies a report it's CEO-shopping, but the denial came via Musk’s own platform while he moonlights in DC and diverts AI chips to X, so why not?

THE GIST

Elon Musk might be too much Elon Musk… even for Tesla. The chair of Tesla’s board, Robyn Denholm, says it’s “absolutely false” that Tesla is looking to replace its talismanic CEO. She posted this denial on X, formerly Twitter, and currently a $44 billion monument to one man’s midlife crisis, the same person she’s denying wants to replace. So, yeah, another totally normal day at the world’s most normal car company.

WHAT HAPPENED

This all comes after The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday evening that Tesla’s board quietly contacted executive search firms last month to maybe, possibly, kinda look for a new CEO. This was around the same time Musk promised investors he'd totally start showing up to work again after spending the better part of Q1 LARPing as the Secretary of Whatever in the Trump administration.

Denholm, a longtime Musk loyalist, then jumped in to douse the story with cold PR water. In her post, she insisted that the board remains fully behind Elon and dismissed the idea of a CEO search as complete fiction. Her defense came across as less "corporate reassurance" and more "blink twice if you're OK," as a public show of loyalty delivered from inside the walls of Elon’s empire, using his megaphone, to defend his position.

To recap: denial issued on the platform Musk owns, about whether Musk is being quietly replaced, while Musk is telling everyone he’s almost ready to go back to doing his actual job on a full-time basis. 

WHY IT MATTERS

Let’s rewind.

In 2016, Musk strong-armed Tesla into acquiring the struggling solar panel firm SolarCity, run by (surprise!) his cousins. Shareholders were skeptical, analysts raised eyebrows, and yet the board rubber-stamped the $2.6 billion deal. Post-merger, SolarCity's financials turned out to be roughly as clean as a burnt-out battery pack. The whole thing looked a lot like a bailout dressed up as synergy, but the board’s response was basically: “¯\(ツ)/¯.”

Then, in 2018, Musk tweeted that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private at $420 a share. It was a weed joke dressed up as financial strategy, and it ended up costing him $20 million, the board another $20 million, and his gig as Tesla chairman. The SEC wasn’t amused, probably because publicly traded companies can’t just YOLO tweet major corporate decisions. The board stood by him anyway, shrugging through what was arguably securities fraud and assigning him a Twitter babysitter who never really ended up sitting.

And let’s not forget the $55.8 billion compensation package also approved in 2018, a deal so mindbogglingly large that a Delaware judge voided it in January 2024, ruling that the board was essentially Musk’s cheering section and had failed to look out for shareholders. Around the same time, Musk was caught diverting a huge shipment of Nvidia AI chips, originally earmarked for Tesla, over to X. That move may have delayed Tesla’s self-driving tech roadmap just so Elon could juice his newest algorithmic fever dream. Toss in erratic behavior, Autopilot investigations, public drug use, employee lawsuits, and customers scraping the logos off their cars, and you start to get something of a thematic picture

Now, he’s neck-deep in Washington helping President Trump “reinvent” the federal government, while Tesla’s stock is down, its margins have cratered, and its once-glossy brand is melting like a RoboTaxi prototype in the desert.

But here’s the kicker: Elon’s hard political turn may be the moment the board started whispering the unthinkable. It's not just that Tesla's profit fell 71% or that Cybertruck flopped harder than Morbius. It’s that Elon spent election night at Mar-a-Lago, helped write the new federal org chart, and then disappeared for weeks while German EV buyers quietly backed away from their Model Ys like they were farting out QAnon podcasts.

Tesla's customer base skews liberal. Its employees (especially the ones who still believe they’re building a sustainable future) aren’t exactly jazzed about seeing their CEO yukking it up with a guy who wants to deregulate clean energy into the ground. And now you’ve got execs being ousted for saying the quiet part out loud: that Elon’s politics are hurting the brand and the talent pool.

WHAT'S NEXT

If the board isn’t looking for a new CEO, they’re grossly negligent. If they are, and they’re letting him deny it publicly, they’re spineless. Either way, Tesla’s biggest asset is also its biggest liability. And the Musk Premium, once a catalyst for a $1.5 trillion market cap, is starting to feel more like a brand tax.

This is the same board that sat silently while Elon ran five other companies, tweeted through lawsuits, tanked Twitter’s value, and live-streamed himself looking like a Bond villain who sells nootropics on the side. They’re just now realizing that being “visionary” doesn’t mean you’re supposed to literally vanish into a MAGA-adjacent think tank and outsource your job to cabinet meetings.

To be clear, Musk says he’s coming back. He’s promised to spend more time at Tesla. Again. For real this time. “Starting next month,” he said. Which, to anyone familiar with Elon-speak, might as well mean “once Dogecoin hits $1 and I can beam myself in from orbit.”

And if the Tesla board did explore a CEO search, that’s not betrayal. That’s self-preservation. The last straw might not have been the litany of side hostels, the messy personal lie, the controversial tweets, the political awakening, the declining margins, or the busted production lines. It might have been Denholm and her board finally coming to the realization that being a transformative visionary does not require the same skill set as being the chief executive of a publicly traded company with a market capitalization of almost $1 trillion.

Because at some point, the company has to choose: is it still the world’s most valuable carmaker or just another character in the Elon Musk Extended Universe?

© MOBY TECHNOLOGIES

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