Tesla Board Chair Robyn Denholm has done extremely well for herself in the past year — largely by selling off most of her shares in the electric car company. She unloaded over 65% of her shares and options in the past 12 months, yielding $168 million before taxes–benefitting from the stock’s spike following President Donald Trump’s election victory in November.
Denholm, who’s led the Tesla board since the Securities and Exchange Commission forced CEO Elon Musk out of that role in 2018 following his false tweets about securing funding to take the company private, retained just 85,000 shares and 412,000 options in the company following her most recent share sale this month, for $43 million, according to SEC filings. That’s down from 15,000 shares and 1.47 million options a year ago. A likely reason for the heavy selling: her options are due to expire in June. So she’ll likely remain a heavy seller of her remaining options in the next few months. Since 2017, she’s sold $448 million of Tesla stock, before taxes.
“Board directors get paid in stock and it’s really scary to have your entire net worth in one company’s assets. So it’s perfectly understandable that executives and directors would sell some stock when they can,” said UCLA professor Andrew Verstein, co-director of its Lowell Milken Institute for Business Law and Policy. “On the other hand, it’s a little bit scary because they know how the company is going to do, and if they’re selling that could be a bad sign.”
Most of Denholm’s sales occurred under a plan set in July 2024–she’s exercised and sold over 403,000 options since then–so while the overall reduction in her holdings is dramatic, it isn’t entirely surprising. She, Musk and the six other board members are also on the hook to reimburse the company for as much as $919 million under a settlement approved by the Delaware Court of Chancery last month that found they excessively compensated themselves between 2017 and 2020. The board as a group is returning $277 million in cash, over $450 million of stock options and foregoing options for 2021 through 2023.
Denholm’s individual portion isn’t detailed in the settlement agreement. Given Musk’s 12% stake in Tesla, he’s likely to owe most of the reimbursement.
Denholm didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on her stock sales. Tesla rose 5.8% to $355.94 on Thursday.
lon Musk, with his son X Æ A-Xii, speaks with President Donald Trump and reporters in the Oval Office at the White House this week.
The Washington Post via Getty Images
With a current $1.1 trillion market valuation Tesla is by far the world’s most valuable automaker, and a highly volatile stock since its 2010 IPO. Musk’s close ties to Donald Trump, enhanced by over $200 million the South African-born billionaire contributed to aid his 2024 presidential run, have been wildly beneficial for Tesla so far.
The stock began spiking in November following Trump’s defeat of former Vice President Kamala Harris, peaking at an all-time high of $479.86 on Dec. 17, with investors assuming the new administration would be highly favorable to Musk’s companies, which had faced investigations and regulatory scrutiny under the Biden Administration. An early bonus for Tesla appeared to be a $400 million State Department contract to buy armored electric vehicles, initially identified as Teslas, though that deal is suspended for now.
Denholm, an Australian native who joined Tesla’s board in 2014, is also a partner with Blackbird Ventures, which operates in Australia and New Zealand, and was previously CFO of Australian telecom company Telstra Corp. She is not the only Tesla board member to sell off a big chunk of stock in the past year.
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Kathleen Wilson-Thompson, who formerly served as chief of human resources at Walgreens Boots Alliance and joined Tesla’s board in December 2018, has sold $106.5 million of stock and options in the past year, offloading most of her shares in the company. She still had options for 120,948 shares as of last month, down from 765,855 a year ago.
Tesla board members, including Musk’s brother Kimbal, who holds 1.46 million shares, and James Murdoch, have been big financial winners as the stock’s value has surged, especially since the company became highly profitable in 2020 when its Shanghai Gigafactory opened. However, that adds to concerns that they’ve failed in recent years to moderate CEO Musk’s increasingly polarizing comments and actions that threaten the Tesla brand. That’s become an even bigger issue now that he’s leading DOGE, the so-called Department of Governmental Efficiency, for President Donald Trump, and attempting to make major federal budget cuts despite concerns about the legality of that effort.
“It is a company that is succeeding by all metrics, even though all of its inputs are shoddy by conventional standards of good corporate governance or what the Delaware chancellors want to see,” Vernstein said. “Tesla seems to be following the thesis that we can do just fine without those procedures and we don’t care if it looks bad.”
“Can you run a company that is quite ambitious and does not check any of the good practices boxes if your idea is good enough, if your CEO is charismatic enough, if your engineering is good enough?” he said. “Can you ignore all of the other niceties, and rally investors and customers? And if that pisses off a few judges and a few law professors, so be it.”
With reporting assistance from Kerry Dolan and Andrea Murphy. This story was originally published on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
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