Tesla President Robyn Denholm has signed a new contract with the company to prepare to sell up to $50 million worth of TSLA stock.
Denholm is an Australian entrepreneur who has led Tesla’s board of directors.
He rose to the position after CEO Elon Musk was forced to resign from his position as punishment for his “private” tweet deemed misleading by the SEC.
Many see her only as a figurehead on the board of directors, which is believed to still be under the direction of Elon Musk. Musk’s brother Kimbal, as well as longtime friends Ira Ehrenpreis, James Murdoch and J. B. Straubel, are also on the board.
The board rarely publicly cares about Tesla’s affairs and is known for its “laissez-faire” attitude toward Musk, even in its most debatable moments.
Despite this “laissez-faire” attitude, he made up for his role at Tesla well.
In 2022, it earned more than 600,000 shares (before the opposite split) worth more than $85 million at the time. Tesla shareholders sued the company last year over what they believed was an overpayment by the board, which eventually settled and agreed to leave. recover about $735 million in inventory and cash.
Now it turns out that the president needs to sell some of the shares she controlled to hold.
In a new SEC filing today, Tesla disclosed that Denholm has signed a new agreement late last year to sell up to 281,116 of her Tesla shares:
On October 23, 2023, Robyn Denholm, one of our directors, followed trading rule 10b5-1 for the potential sale of up to 281,116 shares of common stock, subject to certain conditions. The publicity agreement covers features of shares maturing in August 2024. The expiration date of the agreement is August 16, 2024.
Right now, it’s over $50 million.
Tesla also revealed that Drew Baglino, its senior vice president of engineering, also signed a new deal whereby he can sell up to 115,500 shares.
The new disclosure comes amid discussions about CEO Elon Musk’s upcoming pay plan, which the CEO needs to be enough to allow him to earn 25% on Tesla stock.
I’m not a fan of Tesla’s board of directors. Whether you’re an Elon fan or not, you have to admit that if a CEO had acted like that at any other big company, the board would have gotten involved.
Amazing job. Sit on the board, signal anything very occasionally, get hugely overcompensated with stocks you sell from time to time, in case you want $50 million worth of pocket change.
These greedy people better be prepared to sleep in the waiting line if they want to keep their $22. 84-an-hour job.
It’s only because they’re Tesla and Elon that the dashboard goes silent.
I’m willing to listen to other criticisms and see evidence to the contrary, if it exists, but it turns out to me that Denholm is content not to make waves and take money out of his tens of millions of Tesla shares each year.
Elon himself has previously described the role of chairman of the board as “honorific” and “not needed” to run Tesla.
But now, he doesn’t seem to care that they receive tens of millions of dollars worth of Tesla stock until they do their job, which is governance and oversight of leadership: him.
Fred is the Editor in Chief and Main Writer at Electrek.
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