The latest economic report; Elon Musk's ties to Tesla directors; Musk's pay package
1) Friday's economic report had terrific news regarding jobs, wages, and productivity:
- The unemployment rate was 3.7%, continuing an extraordinary two-year streak below 4%
- Inflation-adjusted wages rose 4.5%
- The economy added 353,000 new jobs in January
- The jobs numbers for the prior two months combined were revised upward by 126,000
- Worker productivity rose 2.7%
- The Black unemployment rate was under 6% for a full year, the lowest in history
This further reinforces my constructive – maybe even outright bullish – view of the markets this year.
2) The Wall Street Journal had quite a story over the weekend about Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk: The Money and Drugs That Tie Elon Musk to Some Tesla Directors. Excerpt:
Multiple other directors of Musk companies have deep personal and financial ties to the billionaire entrepreneur, and have profited enormously from the relationship. The connections are an extreme blurring of friendship and fortune and raise questions among some shareholders about the independence of the board members charged with overseeing the chief executive. Such conflicts could run afoul of the loose rules governing what qualifies as independence at publicly traded companies.
On Tuesday, a Delaware judge struck down Musk's multibillion-dollar pay package at Tesla, saying board members who signed off on it in 2018 were beholden to Musk.
These Tesla and SpaceX board members, although they are designated independent directors, have invested millions in Musk companies, including their own money and money they control.
The former Tesla director and current SpaceX director has been a close Musk friend for decades and also has used drugs with him, according to people familiar with the use.
As I've written many times before, I admire Musk in many ways and think humanity owes him a debt of gratitude.
However, I fear he has gone off the rails in the past couple of years due to some combination of borderline autism, extreme narcissism, overwork, sleep deprivation, a severe X (formerly Twitter) addiction, the lack of any guardrails, and – apparently – drug addiction.
3) Along the same lines, in response to this post on X by Brian Krassenstein, "I don't care what you think of Elon Musk or CEO pay. Any shareholder I know would die to bring on a CEO with the stipulations that Musk got in 2018," I wrote to my Musk/Tesla e-mail list:
I wish people would stop enabling Musk's bad behavior.
He is a brilliant innovator, entrepreneur, and engineer who worked 24/7/365 for more than a decade to build one of the world's most valuable companies that's changing the world for the better, so I don't at all begrudge the big pay package he got...
But Musk and his rubber-stamp board still have to follow the public company rules about conflicts of interest, disclosures, etc.
Instead, his fanboys (and X addiction) have created an out-of-control man-child who thinks laws don't apply to him...
I think Musk's increasingly unhinged behavior is incredibly dangerous – not just for him, his companies, and his shareholders, but society at large for the message it sends and the copycats it creates: that if you're rich enough and enough of a bully, you can get away with pretty much anything.
So while I'm rooting for Tesla, SpaceX, etc. to continue to be successful, I hope Musk gets his comeuppance in a big way, again and again, until the message gets through his thick, arrogant skull that he has to play by the same rules as everybody else...
(If you wish to subscribe to my personal Musk/Tesla e-mail list, simply send a blank e-mail to: tsla-subscribe@mailer.kasecapital.com.)
Best regards,
Whitney
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