For years, the Tesla board has endured criticism for being too cozy with CEO Elon Musk.
The eight-person board, which includes the CEO’s brother, Kimbal Musk, signed off on a historically high pay package for the Tesla chief in 2018, and has kept Musk at the helm despite several incidents that would have pushed most boards to find a new leader. That includes Musk’s infamous public musings about taking Tesla private, openly discussing his use of mind-altering drugs, or the fact that he’s deeply involved in or running other major companies, including X and SpaceX.
More recently, however, Musk’s extracurricular activities have gone into hyperdrive. He’s been running the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, where he has slashed tens of thousands of federal workers’ jobs, and his intense involvement in President Donald Trump’s administration has invited high-profile protests and boycotts against his car company. Between January and the end of April, Tesla’s share price fell more than 40%.
For months it seemed that the board was unmoved by the company’s plunging share price while Musk focused on D.C. But Dan Ives, a leading tech analyst at Wedbush Securities and longtime Tesla bull, believes the board has indeed taken control. That prospect has given him greater confidence in the company’s future after he recently warned of severe value destruction.
“Looking back on the earnings call from last week, we saw a dialed-in and ‘reading the room’ Musk we have rarely seen in the past,” Ives told Fortune. He added that Wedbush now further believes that the board “likely played a bigger role in the commentary at the beginning of the conference call than originally thought.”
Ives is referring to Musk’s widely reported introductory comments during the April 22 earnings call, during which Musk addressed the elephant in the room before discussing Tesla’s financial results. Musk said he felt the lion’s share of the work to get the DOGE team in place had been completed. “Probably starting next month, in May, my time allocation at DOGE will drop significantly,” he said.
Musk went on to say that Tesla’s current situation was not a crisis of the near-death sort that the company has survived many times before. Tesla shares rose 5% following Musk’s announcement.
“Musk understood well that [the] time for politics is over,” Ives said, and that it’s time now for Musk to “move onto a new chapter and lead Tesla into its autonomous and robotics future.”
“The Board was in a tough situation,” Ives added. But it “ended up with a great result.”
Ives’s comments come on the heels of a major Wall Street Journal report published Wednesday alleging that the board had launched a search to replace Musk as CEO, engaging an executive search firm in the process. Tesla’s board chair, Robyn Denhom, has denied the report, and Tesla released a statement on social media platform X saying in part: “The CEO of Tesla is Elon Musk and the Board is highly confident in his ability to continue executing on the exciting growth plan ahead.”
In a note to investors, Ives commented: “We continue to believe Musk’s days at the White House are now ending after this ‘warning shot’ from the Tesla board.” He also appeared on MSNBC, dismissing the idea of a CEO ouster at Tesla, adding that he would be surprised if the board replaced Musk within the next five years.
