Tesla CEO Elon Musk at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC, Wednesday, July 24, 2024.
Samuel Kunlun | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is asking Tesla The board would remove CEO Elon Musk if the company investigates his use of company resources to benefit his other ventures, including SpaceX and xAI.
“Tesla’s board of directors appears to have failed in its fiduciary duty to Tesla shareholders and neglected to address CEO Musk’s apparent conflict of interest,” Warren wrote in a 10-page article. letter Tesla Chairman Robyn Denholm delivered a speech on Thursday. Musk also runs Neuralink and The Boring Co.
Warren, a member of the Senate Banking and Armed Services committees, has expressed similar concerns in the past, including asking the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate Musk and Tesla. She also sent Denholm a letter in late 2022 after Musk sold billions of dollars’ worth of Tesla stock in part to fund a leveraged buyout of Twitter, which he later renamed X.
Musk has been critical of Warren for years. He has been calling her “Senator Karen” since at least 2021, and angry at her Calls for increasing taxes on the wealthy, closing tax loopholes for corporations and billionaires, and combating corporate “greedy inflation.”
Among the concerns Warren listed in her letter are that Musk has formed xAI, an artificial intelligence startup outside of Tesla, and that although the automaker bills itself as an artificial intelligence company, he has threatened to For a higher salary, he will work on robotics and artificial intelligence outside of Tesla. NVIDIA X artificial intelligence chip originally designed for Tesla.
Warren’s letter comes two months after CNBC reported that letters from Nvidia employees also showed that Musk moved a large number of artificial intelligence processors reserved for Tesla to X. Silla poached employees and one employee resigned. It is said that it is because The board operates “like a territorial family company rather than a public company with strict rules and regulations”.
Warren gave Denholm and Tesla until August 23 to answer questions about the board’s oversight of Musk and the “entanglements” between his various businesses.
A spokesman for the senator’s office confirmed that Tesla and Denholm never responded to Warren’s previous letter. Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.
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