‘Extremely bad’: Elon Musk furious at Tesla allegations, hits back at the WSJ

US Special Government Employee (SGE) Elon Musk vehemently rejected a report (published on Wednesday) by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), which alleged that Tesla’s board of directors had begun looking for a new Chief Executive Officer to replace him. 

The billionaire entrepreneur, who was one of the automotive company’s earliest investors nearly two decades ago, slammed the WSJ’s claims—in an X post in reply to a Tesla post categorically denying the same—calling them “deliberately false”, and accusing the newspaper of a breach in journalistic ethics.

"It is an EXTREMELY BAD BREACH OF ETHICS that the @WSJ would publish a DELIBERATELY FALSE ARTICLE and fail to include an unequivocal denial beforehand by the Tesla board of directors," he clarified firmly.

According to the WSJ report cited in Reuters, the idea of a replacement for Musk arose about a month ago, because the board members felt that his focus had been diverted from his largest company to his duties as an SGE for the White House at a crucial time for the company that saw its stocks sinking, which in turn, had led to a loss of faith from its investors. The report cited unnamed employees and executives at Tesla who had expressed concerns about Musk's leadership, his availability, and the impact of his politics on the company’s workforce and customer base.

Musk’s engagement with right-wing politics, as well as his unpaid work for the Trump administration as a Special Government Employee for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—a White House team tasked with cutting federal spending, which terminated a number of government grants and contracts, and affected the work of various agencies—can also be attributed to a wave of unpopularity that led to a decline in Tesla’s stocks.

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The WSJ further claimed that it could have been the subsequent succession crisis at Tesla that prompted Musk’s decision to step back from his governmental duties and pay attention to it. 

The automotive company’s first-quarter profits reportedly declined by a whopping 71 per cent, and its share price fell from $1.5 trillion (in market value) to approximately $900 billion from December 2024 to March 2025. In the face of these developments, Musk reportedly told investors during an earnings call that he planned to return his focus to Tesla starting the following month. 

A few hours after Musk’s response, Tesla chair Robyn Denholm denied the report as well, stating on X that it was "absolutely false", and that the EV maker's board was "highly confident" in Musk's ability to "continue executing on the exciting growth plan ahead".

However, as a Reuters report shows, Denholm, who had been hand-picked by Musk, had faced criticism over his (and her own) controversial pay package, which had raised questions about her bias towards Musk. Denholm, however, was quick to categorically quash the allegations, with an additional spokesperson confirming that the pay was fair.

Amid rising competition globally, Tesla is at a crossroads, with its focus shifting from Musk’s promise of rolling out an affordable EV lineup to driverless taxis and humanoid robots, highlighting Tesla's future as an AI and robotics company, instead of an automaker for the future.

World