In a filing with his least favorite regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission, on Monday, Tesla revealed that Musk is adding the title “Technoking of Tesla”. It also said that CFO Zach Kirkhorn had assumed the title of “Master of the Currency”.
Each executive will also retain his or her most standard title.
Musk once held the title of president of Tesla, but was stripped of that title in 2018 in a deal with the SEC over misleading tweets he sent. He had said “guaranteed financing” to make Tesla private at $ 420 a share, when in fact, he had only discussed, not a firm agreement, about such financing with a Saudi sovereign wealth fund.
The SEC originally tried to remove him from his title as CEO, but agreed to get him to pay a $ 20 million fine and give up the title of president, a position now held by Robyn Denholm.
The bizarre changes to the title overshadowed a separate lawsuit, which revealed that Jerome Guillen, who was president of Tesla’s automotive division, “made the transition” last week to Tesla’s president of heavy trucks.
Tesla is working on an electric semi-tractor truck. But it is seriously behind schedule: Tesla originally promised it would be available in 2019. In January, Musk told investors that it would “make no sense” to build the truck now, because it would require five times more batteries than a Tesla car – but it would not be sold for five times as much money. Batteries are a significant part of the cost of an electric vehicle.
Although Guillen held the title of President of Tesla Automotive, it was clear that Musk was the one who oversaw the company’s automotive operations, in addition to his role as President, CEO and Chief Technology Officer of the SpaceX rocket company.
From the beginning, Musk led Tesla as a disruptive force, trying to change the entire automotive industry and change the world to use electric vehicles instead of traditional ones with an internal combustion engine. Among his most recent disruptive moves was the disclosure that Tesla bought bitcoin of volatile digital currency with $ 1.5 billion of his money in hand.
Musk has strongly criticized the security measures taken to combat Covid-19, using an investor’s call for an obscene speech in which he called such measures “fascist” and anti-American. This was not his only unusual call to an investor: during a call in 2018, he interrupted his then CFO, who was answering an analyst question to say, “Boring and stupid questions aren’t legal. Next?” He insulted other people by asking questions on that call as well.
He also recently got in touch on Twitter to
Russian President Vladimir Putin to ask if he would like to do an interview with him on the Clubhouse social media app. In the past, he appeared on a podcast and smoked marijuana, although it was done in California, where it was legal.
Tesla has occasionally seen a rapid turnover of top executives, including an accounting director who left after less than a month on the job after his tweet about going public. But Kirkhorn – the newly appointed Coin Master – has held the title of CFO for two years.
Investors embraced Musk and Tesla, raising the company’s stock value to make it one of the most valuable American companies of any kind. The company is worth almost as much as the seven largest automakers in the world combined.
But the action has been on a kind of roller coaster ride recently. It closed Friday at 21% below its record closing in late January. This puts it in bear market territory – although it rose 23% compared to where it closed on Monday of last week.
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