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Comment by mey | Hacker News Reader

I don't own stock in Tesla. How do shareholders of any of his companies consider it acceptable for Musk to do what he is doing as a CEO? By that I mean, dividing his attention between so many projects, and co-opting the resources of one company for another. It reeks of a potential shareholder lawsuit waiting to happen.

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I think that they've been fine with it so long as the stock price has continued to climb. If it starts to meaningfully fall, I'd except sentiment to more meaningfully change on him running multiple businesses/DOGE.

It's not like religion where I care how my pastor acts. He's got a job. His performance at the job is about whether the company is successful. The company is successful by my metrics if it goes up in value as determined by the market. Obviously he can't be eating human meat or something outrageous, but in general, if his moving of Tesla engineers to X for a month helps him I don't care if Tesla does well anyway.

Is this where we’re at? The goalpost is now at eating human meat?

Lol

not a deal breaker :)

Lawrence Fossi's older substack articles go into great depth about the ought-to-be-illegal level of control that Musk has over the board. Lawrence is a commercial trial lawyer so he views Musk's nonsense in a different, more rigorous light. Link: https://montanaskeptic.substack.com/

Some of the moves of the current administration, with recent changes, hobbled much of the competition for Musk, Inc.

The removed rural broadband funding, drives people to Starlink.

The removed charger funding drives people to Tesla chargers.

He's removed large parts of competition.

Maybe the theory is that this improves the share price.

What about the (proposed) ending of the federal EV incentives?

Also, not to be nit picky, but how much rural broadband was actually implemented with the infrastructure funding during the Biden years? My understanding is, they didn't actually get much done.

Tesla already has a foothold in the market. Removing incentives then creates a moat around the established player. This is a common strategy in regularity capture.

Alternately, from another context: Musk is now the most powerful man on the planet. Only a fool would throw that away (or make themselves a target of that power).

It's an unresolvable problem. If you think he's that horrible, you can't get rid of him because you're signing your own death warrant (figuratively or literally, depending on how extreme your view is). If he isn't, you've got an incredible asset in your court.

Most Tesla stockholders have made a lot of money, so why would they not be okay with how he's running the company? Just look at the stock price appreciation over the last 1, 5, and 10+ years.

Shareholders have recourses. First, shareholders can vote to get what they want, they can literally vote out the entire board and replace them with anti-Musk directors that will fire him on day one.

Or they can sell their shares and move on or even short the stock if they have problems with Musk. Which some have undoubtedly already done. It appears that even you don't have a strong conviction that Musk's actions are hurting Tesla, or you'd short Tesla stock.

I have no idea how the shareholders approved that $50 billion pay package (now worth more than $100 billion).

I'm not necessarily a Musk fan, but it was (as I understand it) based on the percentage increase in their share price, something like 10% of the increase in the value to shareholders would go to him. So, for every dollar the shareholders gave him, they got 9 dollars (approximately). So they didn't expect it to be as big as it was, because the appreciation in Tesla's stock price was crazy big. Matt Levine of Bloomberg has written on this in more detail.

The man made us a lot of money. I'm happy to pay him for that. And I'll do it again.

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