Robyn Denholm was on stage Blackbird’s Sunrise when the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published news that Tesla, the company she’s chaired since 2018, was on the hunt for a new CEO.
The basketball-loving-and-owning Australian, a Blackbird director, was talking to Sydney Kings and Boomers coach Brian Goorjian about the lessons from sport for leadership and performance when the bombshell dropped.
“About a month ago, with Tesla’s stock sinking and some investors irritated about Elon Musk’s White House focus, Tesla’s board got serious about looking for Musk’s successor,” the WSJ began, going on to say several executive search firms were contact about a month ago, saying the board had told Musk he needs to stick to his knitting, the EV manufacturer, after his ongoing bromance with the Trump administration and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Media startup Capital Brief was at Sunrise asked Denholm to comment as she came off stage, but she declined, telling the AFR subsequently that “Tesla has been swimming upstream for the entirety of its existence. For me, I need to make sure the team is focused on what they need to deliver.”
Given her pronatalist CEO, Musk, is keen to procreate with as many woman as possible, hitting them up on his social media site, according to some reports, it’s unclear if Denholm was subliminally referencing the reason salmon swim upstream – to spawn.
But what is known in a US SEC filing this week, is that Denholm has just sold another US$32 million (A$50m) worth of Tesla stock, 112,390 shares, having now offloaded around US$150m (A$232m) since December as Tesla shares tanked amid her CEO’s focus on DOGE and the Trump presidency.
Denholm now has around 85,000 shares alongside 300,000+ in stock options that expire in August 2025.
Tesla responded on Musk’s platform this afternoon, in Denholm’s name, saying “This is absolutely false (and this was communicated to the media before the report was published). The CEO of Tesla is Elon Musk and the Board is highly confident in his ability to continue executing on the exciting growth plan ahead.”
Musk subsequently retweeted that post saying: “It is an EXTREMELY BAD BREACH OF ETHICS that the @WSJ would publish a DELIBERATELY FALSE ARTICLE and fail to include an unequivocal denial beforehand by the Tesla board of directors!”
Since Robyn Denholm joined the board in 2014, she’s received “life-changing wealth”, as she told a US court last year as her CEO fought for his US$56 billion payday.
Reuters crunched calculated that Denholm’s compensation over the past decade topped A$1bn – US$682 million in cash and stock over the past decade.
The “61-year-old former accountant”, as Reuters describes her, has sold the bulk of that reward, US$532 million worth of Tesla shares.
The directors did not admit wrongdoing.
It came amid a fight over Musk’s board-sanctioned US$56 billion pay package which was rejected as excessive by a Delaware judge.
Last week, following misses in both the top and bottom lines of Tesla’s first-quarter earnings, Musk pledged to step away from DOGE and concentrate on Tesla, causing its stock to rally. Were it not for government environmental rebates propping up the bottom line, Tesla would have posted a loss.
Musk, meanwhile, is still betting on the autonomous cars he’s promised for nearly a decade as well as robots.
“The future of the company is fundamentally based on large scale autonomous cars and large volume vast numbers of autonomous humanoid robots,” he said.
But in 2025, as sales tanked amid a backlash against the brand due to Musk’s DOGE activities, and Tesla shares halved since a rally when Trump was elected. They remain down around 40%.
While Musk conceded that his role at DOGE played a part in the backlash against Tesla, he said the threat is not serious
“We’ve gone through many many of crisis over the years and actually been through many near the many near death experiences,” he said last week.
“Like, we’re probably we’re on the ragged edge of death at least on maybe a dozen times. It’s been so so many times. This is not one of those times.
More importantly, amid wild fluctuations in the company’s share price, its price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio remains above 150x.
No wonder the Tesla chair is selling, whether the world’s richest man remains as CEO, or not.
Daily startup news and insights, delivered to your inbox.