- Elon Musk runs Tesla and a lot of other companies at the same time.
- Normally investors don't like CEOs to do that. But they've given Musk a pass.
- But now there are real investor concerns about Tesla. Will that force Musk to narrow his focus?
Elon Musk runs Tesla. And Space X. And the company formerly known as Twitter. And Neuralink, the company making chips that are supposed to go in your brain. And a company that operates a tunnel under Las Vegas. And an AI startup, too.
Normally, people who run big publicly traded companies are encouraged to just do that one thing and are discouraged from doing side projects. But Musk does his own thing, and for a long time, the idea that he's a guy who does so many things was part of the pitch: Normal people couldn't pull this off, but Elon is Not Normal.
None of this is secret. Tesla spells it out to shareholders in its public filings, where it describes all of Musk's other jobs.
And this year's proxy filing describes how some of those jobs intersect: Tesla, for instance, has spent $200,000 advertising on the company formerly known as Twitter; and Twitter has spent $1.2 million via "commercial, consulting and support agreements" with Tesla — which presumably refers to Tesla staff who have worked on Twitter since Musk bought it in 2022 (though Musk has previously described some of that work as volunteering). There are also interlocks between Tesla and Space X; and Tesla and Musk's tunnel company.
And on top of all that, Musk has essentially used the fact that he runs other companies to justify his demands for a $55 billion pay package from Tesla — if he didn't get it, he posted on the social network formerly known as Twitter, he'd be tempted to spend more time doing cutting edge work at one of his other outlets.
And for a long time, this has all been … fine. Particularly over the last few years, when the market fell head over heels for Tesla and turned it into a company with a trillion-dollar valuation.
Tesla's stock price might cause a rethink of Musk's roles
But now Wall Street has turned on Tesla amid concerns about electric car demand in general and at Tesla in particular. Earlier this month the company reported its first year-over-year sales decline since 2020, and it just laid off 10% of its workforce.
Tesla stock is now down more than 60% from its pandemic-era peak; it's dropped 37% so far this year.
All of which makes me wonder if some Tesla investors will eventually work up the nerve to demand that Musk spend more time working on Tesla and a little less on at least some of his side projects. Or, failing that, if Musk will at least start performatively demonstrating that he's spending more time on Tesla.
The knee-jerk response here ought to be: Good luck with that! Musk does what Musk wants. And that's worked out great for the third-richest man in the world.
But even Elon Musk sometimes has to accept the world as it is, not the way he'd like it to be, which is why he was compelled to buy Twitter after trying to get out of a binding sales agreement.
And if Tesla keeps stumbling, and its price keeps dropping, maybe he'll decide that he doesn't need to do quite so many things at the same time.
