Elon Musk, the owner and main shareholder of luxury car-maker Tesla, agreed on Saturday to resign as president and pay a $ 20 million fine in an agreement to settle the charges filed this week by the Stock Exchange and values.
According to CNN, the agreement, which requires court approval, will allow Elon Musk to remain as CEO, but he must leave his position as chairman of the board within 45 days, and can not seek re-election for three years. The presence of Musk at the head of Tesla has been questioned for months, initially by the repeated inability of the automaker to reach production quotas for Model 3 established by the businessman himself.
Doubts about the management style of Musk recently increased with the multiplication of tweets and controversial statements, such as calling pedophilia one of the divers who participated in the rescue of Thai children trapped in a cave. The institution considers that Musk’s actions are so serious that in his application he requests that he be prohibited from serving as a manager of Tesla.
In this context, several American media have pointed out in the last few hours that Musk has refused to reach an agreement with SEC to abandon his position at the head of Tesla.
According to the CNBC television network, the possible agreement would require Musk to leave the presidency of the Tesla board of directors for two years and impose a fine on the businessman and the company, but he would not demand that he plead guilty to fraud. Although doubts about his ability to remain at the helm of Tesla multiply, Musk has decided not to comment on his legal problems and surround himself with his legion of followers on Twitter, his favorite means of communication.
Although Musk tries to give an air of stability and tranquility when its leadership is seriously in danger, the stock markets begin to give signals that the image of the employer no longer has the same value that enjoyed only a few months ago.
On Friday, Tesla shares lost nearly 14% of their value and closed the day at $ 264.77, $ 42.75 less than the mark set at the end of Thursday. The loss is the biggest suffered by the manufacturer since the end of 2013. Since Musk surprised everyone with the tweet about the sale of Tesla, the value of the shares of the manufacturer has been reduced by 30%, which means that investors have lost almost 20,000 million dollars.
The punishment to Musk is double. Not only is he being sued by SEC and by several groups of investors who feel cheated by his actions, but as the largest individual shareholder of Tesla, his fortune has been considerably reduced in the last 45 days.
Musk owns around 20% of Tesla shares so, since the beginning of August, the businessman has lost about 4,000 million dollars with the fall. The analysts do not doubt that a CEO of any other company that had suffered such a sharp loss of the value of the shares and faced so many demands, would have been forced to abandon his position.
But in the case of Elon Musk and Tesla, many fear that without the entrepreneur, the company would no longer have the attractiveness that has made it more than just an automobile manufacturer.