Tesla shareholders have finally reached their breaking point with Elon Musk's attention deficit. In what might be the most polite corporate intervention I've seen in years, investors are now formally asking the mercurial billionaire to—wait for it—work a standard 40-hour week at the company he runs.
Let that sink in.
The shareholder proposal, slated for Tesla's upcoming annual meeting, essentially amounts to begging the CEO to show up to the office like a regular employee. It's corporate governance reduced to parenting a teenager: "Could you please, just this once, focus on your responsibilities?"
I've covered executive compensation disputes for nearly a decade, and this one feels different. It's not about money (though we'll get to Musk's eye-watering pay package in a minute). It's about time—the one resource even billionaires can't manufacture more of.
The timing couldn't be more awkward for Tesla. Once the undisputed king of electric vehicles, the company's market dominance is slipping faster than a new driver on black ice. Tesla held a commanding 62% of the U.S. EV market in early 2023. Fast forward a year? That's shriveled to 51%. Meanwhile, sales growth has hit the brakes, and the company recently slashed more than 10% of its workforce.
Not exactly the picture of a thriving enterprise.
What makes this situation so peculiar is the "CEO as free electron" model that Tesla has somehow normalized. Most public companies operate under what normal humans would consider a reasonable assumption—that the person paid hundreds of millions to run the company actually, y'know, runs the company.
But Musk? His attention quantum-tunnels between Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter (sorry, "X"), Neuralink, and whatever other shiny object has caught his fancy this week. Sometimes he materializes at Tesla headquarters, sometimes not. Depends on the alignment of the planets, I suppose.
The whole mess represents a principal-agent problem on steroids. Shareholders (the principals) want the CEO (their agent) to maximize their investment value. But when your agent is simultaneously juggling four or five other companies... well. It's like hiring a real estate agent who's also trying to sell your neighbor's identical house while running a taco truck and mining Bitcoin on the side.
(And people wonder why corporate governance experts drink so heavily.)
Here's the real kicker—Musk is simultaneously fighting for a compensation package worth potentially $56 billion that was recently invalidated by a Delaware court. The audacity is almost admirable. Imagine asking for the largest executive compensation in history while shareholders beg you to show up to the office for a standard workweek.
It's like applying for a promotion after spending half the year "working" from Bali with your camera perpetually off during Zoom calls.
The deeper issue here involves what I'll call the "founder overhang problem." Companies with visionary founders often struggle when those same brilliant minds become more liability than asset. Their quirks and personal obsessions—once charming evidence of genius—become increasingly costly as the company matures.
Apple weathered this with Jobs. Microsoft navigated Gates's transition. Meta struggles with Zuckerberg's metaverse fixation. But Tesla might represent the most extreme case—a founder who seems progressively less interested in the company's core business while chasing a grab-bag of other ventures.
Look, I'm not saying running multiple companies can't work—Jobs did it with Apple and Pixar. But even he eventually had to choose. The question for Tesla investors is whether Musk will make that choice himself, or whether they'll eventually have to make it for him.
Defenders will argue that Musk's scattered portfolio creates "synergies" with Tesla. That his work at SpaceX, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and X somehow makes Tesla more valuable. But that argument gets thinner as Tesla's competitive position weakens. At some point, synergy starts looking suspiciously like neglect.
The shareholders aren't even asking Musk to abandon his famous 120-hour workweeks—they're just asking for one-third of that time to be dedicated to the company that made him the world's richest man.
When you put it that way... is that really too much to ask?
