Tesla nominates ex-CTO JB Straubel to board of directors

Tesla has nominated JB Straubel, the CEO and founding father of e-waste recycler Redwood Materials, to its eight-member board of administrators, in line with an SEC submitting out Thursday. Straubel based his Carson City, Nevada recycling enterprise whereas he was nonetheless serving as CTO of Tesla in 2017, and left the automaker to give attention to it in 2019.

Straubel is deemed a co-founder of Tesla because of his engineering and operations management at Tesla from early on. Joining the corporate in 2004 — nicely earlier than Elon Musk took the reins as CEO — Straubel oversaw the build-out of Tesla’s first battery manufacturing facility exterior of Reno, amongst different issues.

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If he wins shareholders’ votes, Straubel would exchange present Tesla board member Hiromichi Mizuno who doesn’t plan to face for re-election on the firm’s annual shareholder assembly, scheduled for May 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.

Besides Straubel, Tesla is nominating CEO Elon Musk and chair Robyn Denholm to be re-elected to the board of administrators once more.

According to its annual report, Tesla can be asking buyers to once more approve Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC) as the corporate’s auditor and to vote on two totally different government compensation-related issues.

Only one shareholder-submitted proxy proposal will likely be eligible for a vote in May. Stockholders proposed that Tesla present a “key-person risk” report back to buyers, figuring out how the corporate would cope with the departure of key executives for any cause, from retirement to an premature dying or incapacity.

Of explicit concern is Tesla’s reliance on CEO Elon Musk. The firm has beforehand and repeatedly said in monetary filings that it’s “highly reliant on the services” of Musk.

Since final fall, many Tesla buyers have criticized Musk over his choice to promote billions of {dollars} price 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 approved high-ranking Tesla workers to work with him there, too.

A Tesla director, James Murdoch, testified in courtroom that Musk has confidentially mentioned a possible successor to move the electrical automobile business with him. But some buyers are nonetheless on the lookout for solutions concerning the key-man threat.

The proxy proposal notes, “According to a 2018 Morgan Stanley report, in 2017 59 S&P 500 CEOs left their companies, and these companies then underperformed the market by 11% in 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 could exchange them — would invite opponents to “target and recruit high-value executives away from Tesla.”