Dear Mr. Musk,
As an investor who purchased shares in July of 2010, I extend my congratulations to you and the team on the overwhelming shareholder approval of your 2025 compensation package. This validation of your vision and the resulting, truly incredible stock performance over the past decade and a half has been a great success for all long-term investors.
With the approval of this landmark award secured, the terms of engagement must immediately become more rigorous. The successful passage of this compensation plan demands that we immediately address the assurance, which is the solemn promise the Board publicly cited, that your political involvement must promptly wind down. This commitment, while perhaps structurally absent from the financial text, is now a peremptory corporate governance requirement, a non-negotiable condition for maintaining shareholder trust in the Board’s oversight.
Your fiduciary duty, as the chief executive officer, is to act solely in the sustained best interest of Tesla and all its shareholders. The company’s brand and your public persona are inextricably linked; you are synonymous with Tesla. Consequently, your aggressive social media activity, specifically the inflammatory posts supporting partisan political movements, transcends the realm of personal opinion and becomes a matter of corporate liability.
This behavior is actively counterproductive to Tesla’s mission and constitutes a clear violation of the assurances provided to shareholders. Such polarization does not merely risk alienating significant segments of the global customer base; it actively undermines the essential public trust that fuels our global, consumer-facing technology enterprise. These posts are a direct breach of the expectation that was an essential component of the compensation package’s approval narrative.
To be clear, we recognize and respect your rights to self-expression under the First Amendment. However, in your capacity as the leader of the world’s most valuable automotive and emerging AI company, these rights are balanced against an equally weighty set of responsibilities. We demand that the commitment made to the Board and all shareholders be fulfilled immediately. Your focus must now be singularly and unparalleledly dedicated to achieving the ambitious operational milestones that justify this unprecedented award. Compliance with the spirit of the assurance is not optional; it is the unwavering obligation required to earn the value that shareholders have now overwhelmingly validated.
Sincerely,
A Long-Term Tesla Shareholder
The stakes going into this next stage are so much higher than as "a car company" with a ton of side-gigs. We rarely know what other succesful company leaders are thinking politically. They aren't muzzeled they just don't want to tip a chunk of their customer base or irk the regulators of their industries.
ReplyDeleteGood point. I don't want Musk to like other CEOs, but he does need to take this responsibility seriously.
Delete