Tesla Investors Pissed At Elon Musk For Being A ‘Part Time’ CEO

Tesla investors are getting bored with Elon Musk’s antics (similar to would-be buyers), and so they usually are not a fan of one other record payday for the CEO if he continues to be a “part-time” CEO. Shareholders are soon expected to vote on a brand new compensation deal for Musk at this yr’s annual meeting after a Delaware court killed a 2018 package price $56 billion. That number first got here about because folks were concerned that if he didn’t get an enormous payday, Tesla would should compete with Musk’s other corporations for his attention, in line with Fortune. That happened anyway.

Lately, Musk’s attention hasn’t been on any of his corporations, either. No, he’s been much more involved in transphobia, advocating against diversity hiring and illegal immigration, and shitty conspiracy theories as an entire. Basically, he’s been the world’s shittiest guy on the web for some time now. His corporations are suffering due to it, especially Tesla, which just reported a completely dismal first quarter of 2024. Amazingly, since these numbers got here out, Musk has posted about Disney greater than his own automaker on his social media platform, Twitter.

Here’s more from Fortune on how people feel about Musk’s antics:

[W]hile some have been critical of his brand of divisive politics, their complaints focused on Musk’s lackluster enthusiasm as Tesla CEO, which they feel too few are willing to call out.

Twitter once served as a useful mechanism to offer quick feedback to Musk from the community, but now some imagine the Tesla CEO has let his popularity on the platform go to his head.

Some Tesla “fans” at the moment are doing a little things which might be petty and potentially even illegal that affect my life directly – just because they disagree with what I write.

This is a brand new low and it won’t work.

They are messing with the fallacious person. I’ve been sued before, I had…

“The feedback loop is completely broken and now Elon is basking in the praise of his super fans while branding all legitimate criticism as attacks,” says Fred Lambert, who has previously spoken about mistakenly putting Musk on a pedestal.

Lambert, Electrek’s CEO, spoke with Fortune, saying his involvement in the Tesla community goes back to when he was a subreddit moderator. He’s recently distanced himself from Musk after emails surfaced showing the billionaire had favored OpenAI becoming a for-profit company under his control and never Microsoft’s.

“He was always in it for himself,” Lambert wrote on the time, adding “This is not the man I used to consider my hero.”

Speaking to Fortune, Lambert believes the CEO made a strategic mistake by specializing in the expensive chrome steel Cybertruck on the expense of a $25,000 entry model teased at its September 2020 Battery Day, which he believes would have driven further growth. (Musk appears to now be prioritizing a robotaxi following a Reuters report on Friday that he’s put development of the entry model on ice)

[…]

Lambert is indicative of a growing schism locally.

While most don’t care how Musk splits his time since they support the person first—and the corporate second—an increasingly vocal minority wish to see Musk commit himself fully to Tesla’s original mission to decarbonize transport, fearing that this plan has been forgotten because the CEO pivots to robotics and AI—when he isn’t posting his thoughts on X.

Some of Musk’s biggest fans across the web are losing faith.

YouTuber Lee of New Zealand has published over 900 videos dedicated to the corporate under the Tesla Economist account.

He tells Fortune he became increasingly critical after Musk broke one promise after the opposite, whether it’s the never-ending wait for the Semi, the Roadster or the entry model.

Perhaps the largest disappointment, nevertheless, has been the painfully slow progress made with Tesla’s vaunted next-generation 4680 cells and its related failure to succeed in scale with its revolutionary dry battery electrode coating, a game changer when it comes to capital expenditure and manufacturing cost.

“The company itself has been going downhill ever since,” he says.

Musk still hasn’t delivered on the second a part of his Master Plan, and yet he’s already predicting Tesla’s future lies in robotics.

Meanwhile, the core automotive business has faltered and needed a series of price cuts simply to hit its volume goal of 1.8 million vehicles last yr.

“I believe he saw this coming and dumped his stock early as a result” Lee says.

He also criticizes him for popularizing meme cryptocurrency like Dogecoin amongst his followers, knowing he can manipulate the worth with a single tweet.

Much like his promotion of the Shiba Inu-themed digital token, he suspects a number of Musk’s broken guarantees were little greater than an try and pump the stock to fulfill the milestone targets of his mammoth (and now void) pay package.