Tesla shares edged higher in early Thursday trading, reversing a sharp overnight decline, after the electric-vehicle maker denied a Wall Street Journal report that suggested it was looking to replace Chief Executive Elon Musk.
Tesla (TSLA) Chairman Robyn Denholm called the Journal report, which said that some board members had contacted executive-search firms to begin a formal process to replace Musk, “absolutely false,” adding it had communicated this view prior to the paper’s publication.
“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,” Denholm said in a statement posted on Tesla’s official X account.
Musk himself, who has served as Tesla CEO since 2008 and stepped away as chairman in 2018, called the report “an extremely bad breach of ethics” that failed to include “an unequivocal denial beforehand by the Tesla board of directors”.
Elon Musk’s time as ‘cost-cutter-in-chief’ for the Trump administration has coincided with a $650 billion slump in the value of Tesla stock.
Getty Images/Brendan Smialowski
Tesla shares have slumped nearly 42% since their mid-December peak, shedding around $650 billion in value along the way, as investors assessed the impact of Musk’s role in President Donald Trump’s government cost-cutting effort on the EV maker’s global brand and a series of disappointing sales and delivery figures that culminated in last week’s 71% first-quarter earnings slump.
The Journal reported that amid that slump, board members pressed Musk on his need to spend more time with the group, a view he accepted at the time and reiterated to investors in last week’s earnings call.
Related: Tesla Q1 deliveries tumble as Elon Musk’s political role hammers sales
“I think starting probably next month, May, my time allocation to [the so-called Department of Government Efficiency] will drop significantly,” Musk said. “I’ll be allocating probably more of my time to Tesla now that the major work of establishing the Department of Government Efficiency is done.”
Musk is also CEO of SpaceX, which operates the Starlink internet service, as well as the X social media platform he purchased in 2022. The South African-born billionaire also runs Neuralink, xAI and infrastructure-services provider Boring Co.
Despite that vast portfolio and his expected effort on cost-cutting for the Trump administration, Wedbush analyst Dan Ives expects Musk to remain at the Tesla helm for at least another five years.
It is an EXTREMELY BAD BREACH OF ETHICS that the @WSJ would publish a DELIBERATELY FALSE ARTICLE and fail to include an unequivocal denial beforehand by the Tesla board of directors! https://t.co/9xdypLGg3c
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 1, 2025
“We continue to believe Musk’s days at the White House are now ending after this ‘warning shot’ from the Tesla Board,” Ives said.
“This situation with Musk at [the Department of Government Efficiency] was reaching a breaking point, but we believe that cooler heads have now prevailed and that the Board is now NOT actively looing to replace Musk and this ‘code red’ situation is now in the rearview.”
Tesla shares were last marked 0.83% higher in premarket trading to indicate an opening bell price of $284.25 each.
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