Investor's Corner
Op-Ed: Tesla faces a unique challenge–a growing number of investors who no longer believe in Elon Musk
Tesla’s (TSLA:NASDAQ) Proxy Statement 2024 revealed that the company is asking shareholders to approve two big proposals at the upcoming annual meeting of stockholders in June: Tesla’s reincorporation to Texas and the ratification of Musk’s 2018 compensation plan, which was rescinded by a Delaware judge in late January. Considering the sentiments of the Tesla community online today, it would appear that the electric vehicle maker will be facing a rather unique situation in June — a growing group of shareholders who have grown to dislike Elon Musk.
Elon Musk has never really behaved like a conventional CEO, not for Tesla or any company that he leads or has led in the past. Tesla will also never have 100% of his time, as he is also the CEO of SpaceX, and he is involved with his other companies like Neuralink, The Boring Company, xAI, and X, formerly Twitter. For years, Musk and the Tesla community seemed to have maintained an agreement that such a setup was agreeable. But with Tesla stock down 40% year-to-date, sentiments surrounding Musk have become quite negative.
Negative Sentiments
These sentiments became quite evident after Tesla announced that it was looking to ratify Musk’s 2018 compensation package, and they became even more prominent when the company went live with https://www.supportteslavalue.com/, a dedicated website that encourages shareholders to support the company’s proposals. Such sentiments were quite notable in the r/TeslaMotors subreddit, a group with over 2.7 million members. When a user posted a link to https://www.supportteslavalue.com/, the vast majority of the comments claimed that they would be voting against the ratification of Musk’s 2018 compensation package.
Support Tesla!
byu/cicada57 inteslamotors
The same is true on social media platform X. Musk has become more polarizing than ever as he continued to express his opinions on political and societal matters, and this has resulted in a growing number of Tesla community members seemingly getting disillusioned with the CEO. This was quite evident with Leo KoGuan, a prominent retail shareholder who claims to hold over 27 million TSLA shares. While KoGuan has been very supportive of Musk in the past, his recent posts showed a notable disdain for the CEO. “I fell in love with the crafted image, I was naĩve,” KoGuan wrote. He also noted that if Musk only spends more time at Tesla, the company would be so much better off.
If Elon just spends 50% of his working hours at Tesla, none can beat Elon and Tesla. I just want him to spend 50% of his waking hours on Tesla bc he is Tesla tyrant CEO. If he doesn’t want to or has no time for Tesla, he should graciously fade away and appoint his replacement. https://t.co/ROZCtKLCTM— KoGuan Leo (@KoguanLeo) April 18, 2024
A look at the overall sentiments of alleged TSLA shareholders that seem inclined to vote against Musk’s 2018 compensation plan suggests that investors are most frustrated about the company’s stock price, which has never really recovered since Musk sold part of his personal shares when he purchased Twitter. Many are also notably frustrated at Musk’s polarizing and controversial posts on X, some of which seem to be targeting the very demographic that initially supported Tesla and ensured its survival in its early years. The volume of Musk’s posts about topics like DEI, the US border, and politics has also given the impression that he is simply not focused on Tesla anymore.
Elon Musk: Strength to Liability
Overall, the situation could be summarized as follows: In 2018, most TSLA shareholders seemed secure in the belief that Musk was the company’s biggest strength. In 2024, a growing number of shareholders seem to believe that Musk has become Tesla’s biggest liability. So prominent are these sentiments today that some have seemingly adopted the idea that Musk is now weighing Tesla down and driving it to the ground, so the EV maker’s best chance of survival is to kick Musk out of Tesla and replace him with a more level-headed and focused CEO — someone like Tim Cook, who is arguably not as innovative as Steve Jobs, but is the leader that brought Apple to a $2.55 trillion valuation.
Making EVs profitably and at scale is extremely difficult. pic.twitter.com/KZenPfZBwt— ALEX (@ajtourville) April 21, 2024
As noted by Tesla community members on social media, TSLA stock, after accounting for the stock splits that the company has implemented over the years, was trading at less than $20 per share when Musk’s 2018 compensation package was initially approved. Thus, even in its current state, it should be noted that TSLA shares are still up over 800%. While Tesla has fallen significantly from its peak, when the company was worth over a trillion dollars, it is still more than eight times more valuable than it was when investors approved Musk’s compensation plan.
For those who don’t know, the stock was under $20 when it was first approved in 2018. pic.twitter.com/QmbcNcgaLF— John Shoemaker (@RealJohnShoe) April 22, 2024
In a way, voting against the ratification of Musk’s 2018 compensation plan will probably ensure that Tesla becomes a competent, predictable carmaker — and that’s not so bad at all. Tesla will still be one of the few American automotive startups that survived and thrived in a very long time. That’s a whole lot of accomplishments that can never be taken away from the company, no matter what happens moving forward. Voting in support of the company’s proposals would likely mean that Tesla, under Musk’s leadership, will continue to wager its future on risky innovations that hold world-changing potential, like AI and humanoid robots, all while Musk is focused on multiple, high-profile projects like SpaceX’s Starship program.
History will ultimately determine which of these choices will be the better option for Tesla.
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Elon Musk
Tesla Cybercabs narrowly miss deadly Amazon cargo plane crash
An Amazon cargo plane crash near Miami’s airport stopped feet from dozens of Tesla Cybercabs.
An Amazon Prime Air Boeing 767 cargo jet overran the runway at Miami International Airport on Sunday afternoon, killing five people and injuring five more. The jet, operated by North Carolina based carrier 21 Air as Flight 7598, touched down around 2 p.m. after arriving from San Juan, Puerto Rico, then crossed the airport perimeter, plowed across NW 67th Avenue and struck multiple vehicles before catching fire, according to the Associated Press.
Photos and video from the scene show the aircraft’s nose stopped within meters of a fenced staging lot holding dozens of gold painted Tesla Cybercabs, the steering wheel free robotaxi Tesla began putting on public roads in Austin last week. Miami-Dade Fire Rescue has confirmed the plane struck “multiple vehicles” but has not said whether any Cybercabs were among them, and neither Tesla nor airport officials have addressed the fleet directly.
The Cybercabs had not yet entered commercial service in Miami. Tesla’s existing Robotaxi operation there runs on modified Model Y vehicles and has been unsupervised since Ashok Elluswamy confirmed the detail on X in July.
Footage of the plane crash from earlier today | #ONLYinDADE pic.twitter.com/iGoOtnd6cD
— ONLY in DADE (@ONLYinDADE) September 6, 2026
Elon Musk offered the briefest of reactions. Replying to a Zero Hedge post about the Cybercabs sitting so close to the wreckage, he wrote a single word: “Weird.” He has not commented further, and Tesla has not issued a statement.
The timing puts Tesla’s newest vehicle near an unrelated but highly visible tragedy just days after its Austin debut, a launch that had already drawn scrutiny from federal regulators. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an audit how Tesla certified the Cybercab as compliant with federal vehicle safety standards, a process Teslarati covered after the vehicle’s September 3 launch event. That inquiry concerns the car’s lack of a steering wheel and pedals, not the Miami crash.
Investigators from the FAA and NTSB are focused on the plane, not the parking lot beside it. Flight data reviewed by outlets including Simple Flying show the 767 touched down around 170 knots, well above the 135 to 140 knot range typical for the aircraft, though investigators have not determined a cause. Amazon said it is working with authorities and that its priority is the safety of everyone affected.
Whether any Cybercabs were damaged, and what Tesla plans for the fleet parked near one of the country’s busiest airports, remain open questions.
Featured
Tesla Cybercab is coming to Asia this month as US service officially begins
Tesla Asia says Cybercab will be on display in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Beijing and Shanghai this month.
Tesla’s Cybercab is heading to Asia. The official Tesla Asia account posted on X Thursday, inviting Cybercab fans to “Come experience the future of autonomy in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Beijing & Shanghai.” The post went up within hours of Tesla’s own Cybercab milestone in Texas, where the company said Thursday it had begun offering rides in across Austin.
Exact dates and venues for the Asia tour haven’t been released yet, though Tesla Hong Kong replied to the announcement with “Cybercab will be on display in Hong Kong soon,” while Tesla Japan’s response pointed fans to a sign up page for updates. Neither post mentions test rides or a service area, and nothing so far suggests Tesla is launching Robotaxi operations in any of the four cities. Based on how Tesla has run past Cybercab tours, in Europe in late 2024 and at US shopping centers that same December, the Asia stops are almost certainly static displays at Tesla stores or public venues as a means to stimulate buzz for its future driverless ride-hailing service in the big cities.
Cybercab will be on display in Asia this month!
Come experience the future of autonomy in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Beijing & Shanghai. pic.twitter.com/wGmmEastfX— Tesla Asia (@Tesla_Asia) September 4, 2026
The timing lines up with Tesla’s only prior Cybercab appearance in the region, a booth at the China International Import Expo in Shanghai last November, which Teslarati covered at the time. At that event, Tesla’s regional general manager for Shanghai framed the car as evidence of the company’s broader mission, a message Tesla has since formalized in its Master Plan Part IV, which states that “autonomous vehicles have the capacity to dramatically improve the affordability, availability and safety of transportation while reducing pollution, particularly in our increasingly dense global cities.” The same document is where Tesla lays out its “sustainable abundance” framing for Cybercab and Optimus alike, describing the two as the hardware behind an AI driven push to cut the cost of transportation and labor at scale.
Whether Cybercab actually operates as a robotaxi anywhere in Asia remains an open question, considering China has already pushed an autonomous ride-hailing market that’s run on homegrown players like Baidu’s Apollo Go and Pony AI. For now, the four city tour reads as a marketing push timed to Austin’s momentum.
Elon Musk
OpenAI cites distrust of SpaceX in decision to drop Cursor partnership
OpenAI will cut SpaceX-owned Cursor’s model access in November, citing Musk’s history of broken contracts.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced late Friday that it is ending its partnership with Cursor, cutting off the coding tool’s access to its models on November 12. The move comes two weeks after SpaceX completed its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor’s parent company, Anysphere, folding the popular AI coding assistant into Elon Musk’s growing SpaceXAI division.
In a post on its website, OpenAI said the decision came down to trust, not technology. “We cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk’s companies violating contracts,” the company wrote. OpenAI pointed to two specific incidents: X, now part of SpaceX, allegedly breaking the terms of an existing OpenAI contract after Musk bought Twitter.
That lawsuit is the backdrop for all of this. Musk cofounded OpenAI in 2015, left the board in 2018, and sued Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in 2024, arguing they abandoned the company’s nonprofit mission for profit. A federal jury sided with OpenAI in May, finding Musk waited too long to sue rather than ruling on the merits of his claims. Musk said at the time he would appeal to the Ninth Circuit, calling the outcome a “calendar technicality” rather than a real judgment.
SpaceX’s interest in Cursor predates that verdict by weeks. The company first struck a deal with Cursor in April, securing an option to acquire it for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for joint development work instead. As Teslarati reported at the time, the logic was straightforward: Cursor was paying retail prices to Anthropic and OpenAI, two of its most direct competitors, every time a developer used its product, while SpaceX had idle capacity on its Colossus supercomputer, roughly the equivalent of a million Nvidia H100 GPUs, that Cursor could use to train its own models instead. SpaceX exercised the option in June, days after its own IPO, and the deal closed in mid-August.
Once it closed, Musk moved fast. On an all-hands call with more than 1,000 Cursor employees, he reportedly told staff that SpaceXAI’s Grok was playing catchup in the AI race, unlike Tesla and SpaceX in their own markets, and singled out Anthropic as the company to catch. Cursor CEO Michael Truell now reports directly to Musk inside SpaceXAI.
Losing OpenAI’s models leaves Cursor leaning harder on Anthropic’s Claude, which has its own compute agreement with SpaceX, and on Cursor’s in-house Composer model, the one SpaceX’s compute was supposed to accelerate in the first place. OpenAI framed the November deadline as maximum notice under its contract, and said it wants to “go above and beyond” to help developers through the transition. Whether Anthropic makes the same call is now the open question in AI coding.