Is the Tesla board of directors actually functioning in its role? In corporate America, the CEO is supposed to answer to the board, which has a duty to act in the best interest of shareholders and the company. Unless the board has replaced that duty with a cultish devotion to an individual CEO, they should replace a CEO that is spending most of his time on other interests, devolving into a conspiracy theorist, and repeatedly publicly offending the vast majority of the company’s customer base.
The New York Times front page today has a story detailing how Elon Musk “has involved himself in the US election in a manner unparalleled in modern history” on Trump’s behalf. Musk spends much of his time ignoring Tesla creating and amplifying right wing extremist content on Twitter, which he bought and remade. Recall how after Musk bought Twitter and trashed it’s content moderation, racist and anti-semitic content on the platform exploded. A 2024 Fortune article headline calls the platform now “so toxic it’s almost unrecognizable.”
Recently Musk posted, then later deleted, a post questioning why no one had tried to assassinate Biden or Harris. From CNN:
“And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala 🤔,” Musk wrote in the now-deleted X post.
Prior to that, just like your average MAGA news consumer, the supposed genius Musk fell for and posted a completely fabricated image that fit with his far-right extremist views. From BBC:
Elon Musk has deleted an image he shared on X, formerly Twitter, which promoted a conspiracy theory about the UK building "detainment camps" on the Falkland Islands for rioters.
The image - which was faked to look like it had come from the Daily Telegraph website - had been posted by the co-leader of the far-right Britain First party, Ashlea Simon, though it had appeared elsewhere before she shared it.
Mr Musk's post was viewed more than 1.7 million times before it was removed
Musk also recently posted, then deleted (from Newsweek):
On September 3, Musk shared a post from Carlson which included his interview with Darryl Cooper, a podcaster who hosts the history show Martyr Made. The pair discussed the Holocaust and events of World War II, with Cooper making comments that have been widely called out for appearing sympathetic towards Hitler.
In the now-deleted post, Musk wrote that the interview was, "Very interesting, worth watching." He quickly received severe backlash along with Carlson, as Cooper claimed in the video that the Nazis did not intend to kill millions of people, but that they instead "ended up dead" because Hitler was unprepared for war.
And this one (from Business Insider):
Another X user, @breakingbaht, replied to this post: "Okay. Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them. I'm deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don't exactly like them too much. You want truth said to your face, there it is."
Musk replied to this: "You have said the actual truth."
Most relevant to his efforts to influence the upcoming election, NBC News reports:
False or misleading claims about the U.S. election that Elon Musk has posted to X this year have generated nearly 1.2 billion views, according to an analysis published Thursday by the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate.
So Elon Musk spends a lot of time watching “very interesting” videos that are sympathetic to Nazi’s and promoting extremist viewpoints and Donald Trump. Meanwhile, his actual job that Tesla compensates him billions of dollars for, he seems to be putting in less effort into. He publicly calls a statement referring to “hordes of minorities” the actual truth and is not fired. What kind of company keeps on a CEO like that? And now having a CEO so distracted by conspiracy and grievance is starting to show. Today Tesla stock is down big and analysts expect it to continue downward as Elon Musk failed to impress at the latest big Tesla event. From CNBC today: Tesla shares drop 7% after Cybercab robotaxi reveal fails to impress
Morgan Stanley, meanwhile, suggested that Musk failed to make the case that Tesla is an artificial intelligence company during the event. The bank’s analysts noted that Musk didn’t mention any details on improvements to Tesla’s FSD system, nor did the billionaire go into detail regarding rumored plans of a tie-up between Tesla and xAI, Musk’s AI company.
The event “overall disappointed expectations on a number of areas: a lack of data regarding rate-of-change on FSD/tech, ride-share economics and go-to-market strategy,” Morgan Stanley’s analysts wrote in a note Friday.
“We were overall disappointed with the substance and detail of the presentation. As such, we anticipate TSLA to be under pressure following the event,” they added.
In my opinion, Elon Musk was a successful CEO at Tesla because he focused his considerable talents on it for many years. But now I think his focus is clearly elsewhere and his talents have been lost to the neurologic degeneration that occurs with too much time in the online cesspool of right wing extremism and conspiracy. Maybe it is time for the Tesla board of directors to do their job before a good company drowns too.