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Elon Musk\u2019s role as President Trump\u2019s cost-cutting czar and his immersion in right-wing politics appears to be diverting his attention from Tesla at a perilous moment for the electric car company.<\/p>\n
Tesla\u2019s car sales fell 1 percent last year even as the global market for electric vehicles grew 25 percent. Mr. Musk has not addressed that underperformance, and he has offered no concrete plan to revive sales. He has also provided no details about a more affordable model Tesla says it will start producing this year. In the past, Mr. Musk spent months or years promoting vehicles before they appeared in showrooms.<\/p>\n
And he has spent much of his time since the election in Washington and at Mr. Trump\u2019s home in Florida \u2014 far from Austin, Texas, where Tesla has its corporate headquarters and a factory, or the San Francisco Bay Area, where it has a factory and engineering offices.<\/p>\n
In the past decade or so, Tesla went from a struggling start-up to upending the global auto industry. The company sold millions of electric cars and generated huge profits, forcing established automakers to invest billions of dollars to catch up. Tesla\u2019s success has been reflected in its soaring stock price, which helped make Mr. Musk the world\u2019s richest person.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
But now, he seems to have lost interest in the grinding business of developing, producing and selling cars, investors and analysts say. That could have serious ramifications for his company and the auto industry, which employs millions of people worldwide.<\/p>\n
Even before he joined the Trump administration as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, Mr. Musk\u2019s running multiple companies had led investors and corporate governance experts to wonder whether he was spread too thin. Besides Tesla, Mr. Musk controls and runs SpaceX, whose rockets carry astronauts and satellites for NASA and others; X, the social media site; and xAI, which is developing artificial intelligence. And he wants to colonize Mars.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t have a C.E.O. who is fully focused on ensuring that Tesla remains a leader in the E.V. space,\u201d said Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller, who oversees employee pension funds that own Tesla shares worth $1.25 billion.<\/p>\n
Mr. Lander said he wanted Mr. Musk to stay on Tesla\u2019s board and relinquish his chief executive duties to someone who would do the job full time. \u201cThat\u2019s not too much to ask for,\u201d Mr. Lander said. \u201cThat\u2019s just the basic model of shareholder governance in America.\u201d<\/p>\n
Few, if any, executives have ever had such an array of responsibilities, said Eric Talley, a Columbia Law School professor who focuses on corporate governance. And while some of Mr. Musk\u2019s businesses stand to benefit from his ties to the president, it is virtually impossible for Mr. Musk\u2019s commercial and political interests not to collide in ways that could hurt Tesla and his other companies, Mr. Talley said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n