Tesla board chair says impact of Musk’s political turn on Tesla sales is ‘not conclusive’

Tesla’s board chair said she isn’t convinced that Elon Musk’s conservative political turn has hurt the company’s car sales and defended a blockbuster pay package that has drawn criticism from governance scolds and the pope.

Musk’s stint in the White House, subsequent split from the president, and continued embrace of right-wing causes has alienated consumers across the political spectrum, polls have repeatedly found. That sentiment has coincided with plummeting sales of Teslas, particularly in Europe.

Tesla’s board members “have access to a lot of information, and it’s not conclusive one way or another,” Robyn Denholm said in an interview Monday. “Could there be some impact? There could be, but there were other factors as well,” she said, including Tesla’s decision to shut down and retool its main factory this summer.

Denholm also said she isn’t entirely sold on the idea of Tesla investing in Musk’s xAI, a hypothetical that shareholders will vote on at the company’s annual meeting in November. “It’s quite distinct, what the two companies are doing,” she said. “There is always some overlap, but not as much as people think.”

Tesla’s investors are likely to be excited about the idea, which was put forward by a shareholder, though it was welcomed onto the ballot by the board. AI enthusiasm could help Tesla hit the market-cap goals baked into Musk’s pay plan.

But that would create a thorny conflict of interest for Denholm and her fellow directors, with Musk seeking — not for the first time — to use Tesla to subsidize one of his less-profitable ventures. Tesla spent years defending, ultimately successfully, its 2016 acquisition of Solar City, Musk’s struggling clean-energy company.

“There are obviously a lot of learnings” from the Solar City transaction, Denholm said, though she defended it as creating Tesla’s battery and charging division, which accounts for 12% of the company’s revenues and 20% of profits.

Denholm is giving interviews to explain the board’s decision to award Musk a pay package that could be worth $1 trillion if the company hits milestones for market capitalization, profits, and vehicle production. “They are very ambitious plans, but they’re not unrealistic,” said Denholm, who has sat since 2014 on Tesla’s board, which also includes his brother, Kimbal Musk, and James Murdoch.

Tesla says the high headline figure is the cost of keeping Musk focused on Tesla, rather than on his other companies, including SpaceX and Neuralink, or on politics. (When asked whether the board considered more explicit demands over how Musk spends his time, Denholm said “we considered a whole bunch of things, but we also know how Elon works.“)

For most companies and CEOs, the metrics would be preposterously out of reach — among them are an eight-fold increase in market valuation and a 30-fold increase in earnings — but that ignores Musk’s ability to marshal investor enthusiasm and pull off new product launches.

Payouts at escalating metrics would give Musk an additional 12% ownership stake on top of the roughly 20% he already owns, which he has said he needs to ensure that AI is developed responsibly at the company. Under the plan, Musk gets the voting rights attached to some Tesla shares years before he would be able to sell them.

“It’s not about the money for him. If there had been a way of delivering voting rights that didn’t necessarily deliver dollars, that would have been an interesting proposition,” Denholm said. “But in today’s world, it’s very difficult to do that.”

She declined to provide details on whether, for example, the company had considered a move similar to Google’s 2014 introduction of a new class of shares.