JB Straubel, Tesla Motors’ former chief technical officer, speaks throughout a ribbon reducing for a brand new Supercharger station outdoors of the Tesla Manufacturing unit on August 16, 2013 in Fremont, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Pictures
Tesla has nominated JB Straubel, the CEO and founding father of e-waste recycler Redwood Supplies, to its eight-member board of administrators, in accordance with an SEC submitting out Thursday. Straubel based his Carson Metropolis, Nevada recycling enterprise whereas he was nonetheless serving as CTO of Tesla in 2017, and left the automaker to concentrate on it in 2019.
Straubel is deemed a co-founder of Tesla attributable to his engineering and operations management at Tesla from early on. Becoming a member of the corporate in 2004 — effectively earlier than Elon Musk took the reins as CEO — Straubel oversaw the build-out of Tesla’s first battery manufacturing facility outdoors of Reno, amongst different issues.
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If he wins shareholders’ votes, Straubel would change present Tesla board member Hiromichi Mizuno who doesn’t plan to face for re-election on the firm’s annual shareholder assembly, scheduled for Might 16.
Mizuno was beforehand the chief funding officer Japan’s authorities pension funding fund and has been a member of the Tesla board since April 2020. Mizuno has been a member of Tesla’s audit committee.
Moreover Straubel, Tesla is nominating CEO Elon Musk and chair Robyn Denholm to be re-elected to the board of administrators once more.
In accordance with its annual report, Tesla can be asking traders to once more approve Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC) as the corporate’s auditor and to vote on two totally different govt compensation-related issues.
Just one shareholder-submitted proxy proposal will likely be eligible for a vote in Might. Stockholders proposed that Tesla present a “key-person threat” report back to traders, figuring out how the corporate would take care of the departure of key executives for any purpose, from retirement to an premature dying or incapacity.
Of specific concern is Tesla’s reliance on CEO Elon Musk. The corporate has beforehand and repeatedly acknowledged in monetary filings that it’s “extremely reliant on the providers” of Musk.
Since final fall, many Tesla traders have criticized Musk over his resolution to promote billions of {dollars} value of his Tesla holdings to steer a $44 billion buyout of Twitter. Musk appointed himself and stays CEO of the social media platform, and has licensed high-ranking Tesla workers to work with him there, too.
A Tesla director, James Murdoch, testified in court docket that Musk has confidentially mentioned a possible successor to go the electrical car enterprise with him. However some traders are nonetheless searching for solutions in regards to the key-man threat.
The proxy proposal notes, “In accordance with a 2018 Morgan Stanley report, in 2017 59 S&P 500 CEOs left their corporations, and these corporations then underperformed the market by 11% within the subsequent 12 months.”
The Tesla board is asking shareholders to vote towards the key-person threat report. They wrote in opposition to the proposal, arguing that the disclosures requested by shareholders — like figuring out executives most crucial to Tesla’s long-term success and who might change them — would invite opponents to “goal and recruit high-value executives away from Tesla.”