A former Facebook executive has warned that Elon Musk could face activist investors as Tesla’s stock declines. Tesla shares have fallen more than 60% so far this year.
Facebook’s former security chief Alex Stamos warned that activist investors could start buying Tesla shares and even attempt to wrest control of the company from Elon Musk if the electric carmaker’s stock starts to fall. It’s down more than 62% so far this year.
Activist investors buy large stakes in public companies and then agitate for change. If it continues to slide this hard, you’re going to end up with activist investors, and those active investors are going to come on board and then put pressure on Musk.
Perhaps ready to oust Elon Musk as CEO, Stamos talked about Tesla’s big stock drop in an episode of the Moderated Content podcast published on Monday.
If an activist comes along and so far, there’s no sign of that happening they may finally put the brakes on Elon Musk’s behavior,” Stamos said, alluding to his controversial reign as head of Twitter. Stamos said, It might be the thing that slaps him whether he deserves to or not.
Spokespeople for Musk and Tesla did not respond to a request for comment from Insider prior to publication. Stamos was previously the Chief Security Officer at Facebook and he was also previously the Chief Information Security Officer at Yahoo. He last spoke out against the flurry of an activist investor trying to oust a founder.
When some people were making noise that Mark Zuckerberg should be removed from the top seat of Facebook in 2019. Stamos’ comments follow a series of comments on Twitter, with Elon Musk mocking the LGBTQ+ community for prosecuting White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci and allowing Twitter’s former security chief Joel Roth to admit to pedophilia.
Stamos did not return Insider’s request for comment prior to publication. During the past week, Tesla shares have hit their lowest price since November 2020. The electric-car maker’s stock has plunged more than 60% this year after some Tesla investors expressed concern that Twitter had become too much of a distraction for the carmaker’s CEO.
Meanwhile Elon Musk sold his Tesla holdings on Wednesday to help finance his $44 billion Twitter purchase, leaving Tesla stock worth nearly $40 billion over the past 14 months.Tesla’s stock was trading at a little over $150 per share late Friday. Stamos isn’t the only warning that Musk may be facing a reckoning.
He tweeted, need an executioner like Tim Cook, not Elon. Koguan said an executive like the Apple CEO, who is known to be a quiet operating genius, would be a better fit. Having said that, the company may face increasing pressure from activist investors to initiate a stock buyback program in 2023, improve profit margins or take strategic steps.
Ives has been critical of Elon Musk’s association with Twitter in the past. However, the technical analyst said in a note on Thursday that he maintains his outperform rating on the stock because of his optimism about the future of the EV industry.
William Klepper, a management professor who teaches an executive leadership course at Columbia Business School, told Insider that if Tesla’s board doesn’t move forward and bring Elon Musk’s attention back to Tesla, the company will be swamped by activist investors.