Elon Musk says wants more control over Tesla. 'Far from ideal,' says analyst.

By Steve Goldstein

The world's richest person said he doesn't have enough control over the company where he's chief executive and the leading shareholder.

Elon Musk said he doesn't want to grow Tesla's (TSLA) artificial intelligence and robotics capability without having control of a quarter of the company. Musk already owns 13% of the automaker. On the social media service X that he owns, Musk said he would need 25% control.

"If I have 25%, it means I am influential, but can be overridden if twice as many shareholders vote against me vs for me," he said. "At 15% or lower, the for/against ratio to override me makes a takeover by dubious interests too easy."

"Unless that is the case, I would prefer to build products outside of Tesla," said Musk, who according to the Bloomberg Billionaires index has a total net worth of $206 billion, about $25 billion ahead of Jeff Bezos. Musk founded a different company, xAI, which contains his ChatGPT rival Grok.

In another post, he said the Tesla board, which includes his brother Kimbal, is "great," and that it's holding off on a new compensation plan until a verdict is made in the Delaware compensation case.

Musk said he would be "fine" with a dual-class voting structure but was told it is "impossible" to achieve after going public.

Tesla shares have slumped 12% this year and dropped 25% since mid-July, but are up 79% over the last 52 weeks.

Tesla stock fell about 2% in premarket action, to $215.21.

Dan Ives, the influential tech analyst at Wedbush, said Musk's comments won't be warmly received by investors.

"The Street views Tesla correctly (in our view) as a disruptive tech leader and if Musk ultimately went down the path to create his own company (separate from Tesla) for his next generation AI projects this would clearly be a big negative for the Tesla story," he said.

"We also believe Musk having a back and forth about such an important issue over X is far from ideal for the investment community around Tesla and creates a distraction and likely some selling pressure this morning."

Ives kept his outperform rating and $350 price target as he said he thinks the board and Musk will resolve the issues over the next three to six months.

-Steve Goldstein

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01-16-24 0703ET

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