JB Straubel, Tesla Motors’ prior chief technical officer, speaks during a ribbon cutting for a new Supercharger station outside of the Tesla Factory on August 16, 2013 in Fremont, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Representatives
Tesla has nominated JB Straubel, the CEO and founder of e-waste recycler Redwood Materials, to its eight-member board of directors, according to an SEC record out Thursday. Straubel founded his Carson City, Nevada recycling venture while he was still serving as CTO of Tesla in 2017, and left-wing the automaker to focus on it in 2019.
Straubel is deemed a co-founder of Tesla due to his engineering and operations leadership at Tesla from early on. Couple the company in 2004 — well before Elon Musk took the reins as CEO — Straubel oversaw the build-out of Tesla’s outset battery factory outside of Reno, among other things.
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If he wins shareholders’ signify ones opinions, Straubel would replace current Tesla board member Hiromichi Mizuno who does not plan to stand for re-election at the following’s annual shareholder meeting, scheduled for May 16.
Mizuno was previously the chief investment officer Japan’s government pension investment green and has been a member of the Tesla board since April 2020. Mizuno has been a member of Tesla’s audit cabinet.
Besides Straubel, Tesla is nominating CEO Elon Musk and chair Robyn Denholm to be re-elected to the board of directors again.
Agreeing to its annual report, Tesla is also asking investors to again approve Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC) as the company’s auditor and to signify ones opinion on two different executive compensation-related matters.
Only one shareholder-submitted proxy proposal will be eligible for a vote in May. Stockholders proposed that Tesla purvey a “key-person risk” report to investors, identifying how the company would deal with the departure of key executives for any reason, from retirement to an untimely destruction or disability.
Of particular concern is Tesla’s reliance on CEO Elon Musk. The company has previously and repeatedly stated in financial filings that it is “powerfully reliant on the services” of Musk.
Since last fall, many Tesla investors have criticized Musk at an end his decision to sell billions of dollars worth of his Tesla holdings to lead a $44 billion buyout of Twitter. Musk assigned himself and remains CEO of the social media platform, and has authorized high-ranking Tesla employees to work with him there, too.
A Tesla captain, James Murdoch, testified in court that Musk has confidentially discussed a potential successor to head the electric mechanism business with him. But some investors are still looking for answers about the key-man risk.
The proxy proposal notes, “According to a 2018 Morgan Stanley reveal, in 2017 59 S&P 500 CEOs left their companies, and these companies then underperformed the market by 11% in the future 12 months.”
The Tesla board is asking shareholders to vote against the key-person risk report. They author a registered in opposition to the proposal, arguing that the disclosures requested by shareholders — like identifying executives most critical to Tesla’s long-term prosperity and who may replace them — would invite competitors to “target and recruit high-value executives away from Tesla.”