is transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeared in The New York Daily News and City & State.
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The most striking moment of Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting Thursday wasn’t when Elon Musk won a impossible sounding pay package worth nearly $1 trillion. That was a foregone conclusion, given Musk’s popularity with retail shareholders and his ability to vote his own extensive holdings.
To me, the more illuminating moment was when the gathered crowd of shareholders, many of them wearing Tesla themed gear and grooving out to the company’s signature lo-fi beats, booed a proposal by New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli to repeal a new bylaw that essentially makes it impossible for regular shareholders to sue the company.
Tesla’s board recommended against voting for the measure, as they do with nearly every accountability measure proposed over the years. Time and time again, pension fund managers or human rights advocates or even individual investors present shareholders with the opportunity to do the bare minimum to rein in the company’s worst excesses, like trying to prevent child labor exploitation in its supply chain or integrate sustainability metrics in executive pay. And time and time again, shareholders side with the company’s board — or more accurately, with Musk — and reject them.
Time and time again, shareholders side with the company’s board — or more accurately, with Musk
They joyfully vote to dilute their own holdings and reward Musk’s reality-distorting vision for Tesla, one that ignores the company’s current challenges and instead embraces a future defined by “sustainable abundance.” These over-the-top promises include personally owned self-driving cars, robot helpers in every home, and an endless supply of clean energy.
“That’s what I mean by sustainable abundance,” he said. “Is that people can have whatever they want, have all their needs met, but we still keep all of the natural beauty that we want. If somebody can think of a better future, I’m all ears.”
That all sounds really nice, but it isn’t exactly a plan to turnaround Tesla’s declining car sales or counteract vanishing government subsidies for clean energy purchases or win over skeptical regulators who have serious questions about the company’s autonomous vehicle technology. Nor does it acknowledge the damage that Musk himself has done to Tesla’s brand by bankrolling an administration that has kneecapped the clean energy economy, or by then heading up that administration’s effort to fire thousands of federal workers and cancel billions of dollars in humanitarian aid, or by welcoming back white supremacists to his social media platform.
These inconvenient truths rarely pierce the bubble of Tesla’s shareholder meetings. Which is why it was so striking to hear the response to DiNapoli’s warnings that investors were about to make a major mistake in handing over so much control to the mercurial billionaire.
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