Tesla Inc on Friday named Oracle Corp co-founder Larry Ellison, a shareholder and self-described close friend of Chief Executive Elon Musk, to its board to provide the independent oversight demanded by U. S. regulators after Musk tweeted about taking the electric carmaker private.
(Reuters) – Tesla Inc on Friday named Oracle Corp co-founder Larry Ellison, a shareholder and self-described close friend of Chief Executive Elon Musk, to its board to provide the independent oversight demanded by U. S. regulators after Musk tweeted about taking the electric carmaker private.
The move is meant to usher Tesla past months of turbulence following Musk’s Aug. 7 tweet that he was considering taking the company private and had secured funding.
The fallout, which included the U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission subsequently filing fraud charges against Musk for what it said were his “false and misleading” tweets, led some investors to call for stronger board oversight of Musk.
The inclusion of Ellison puts one of the world’s richest people with experience building a startup into a successful company on Tesla’s board. He served as a director at Apple at a critical time for that company – in the five years after Steve Jobs returned to the helm of the then struggling computer maker in 1997, helping oversee one the greatest turnarounds in corporate history.
Joining Ellison on the board, effective Dec. 27, was Walgreens Boots Alliance’s global head of human resources, Kathleen Wilson-Thompson.
Charles Elson, director of the corporate governance center at the University of Delaware, questioned adding a friend of Musk’s and another director with no experience at an industrial company like Tesla.
“Why would you put a friend (on the board) if the idea of the two independent directors were to be objective,” Elson said. “Investors who were hoping for two newly objective directors who could stand up to Mr.
