Longtime Tesla bull Ross Gerber has notified the electric-vehicle maker that he intends to seek a board seat, according to a new report, as he looks to rein in Chief Executive Elon Musk’s antics.
Bloomberg News reported Tuesday that Gerber, the CEO of investment advisers Gerber Kawasaki, disclosed his intentions in a letter to Tesla general counsel Brandon Ehrhart. The firm owns about 440,000 Tesla shares, according to Bloomberg, and Gerber has a personal stake in Tesla as well.
Gerber has been outspoken in his belief that Musk’s massive sales of Tesla stock to fund his Twitter purchase and poor communications have hurt the company, as has Musk’s recent focus on Twitter.
Musk “broke the stock,” Gerber told MarketWatch in a January interview. “If Elon just listens to me for 5 minutes, I could totally could fix the whole situation,” he said. Gerber added that he believed Tesla still has huge upside potential.
Read more: ‘He broke the stock’: Why a prominent Tesla investor wants Elon Musk to put him on the board
At the time, Gerber was looking to join Tesla’s board via new Securities and Exchange Commission policies for universal proxy cards.
As MarketWatch columnist Therese Poletti noted in January, Tesla’s board routinely rubber-stamps policies Musk favors, raising doubts about whether Gerber would have much pull even if he joined the board.
Tesla shares
TSLA,
surged Tuesday, after George Soros’s investment fund disclosed it boosted its stake in the fourth quarter and amid rumors that Tesla will soon announce plans to build a factory in Mexico.
The stock is up 70% year to date, though still down 32% over the past 12 months, compared to the S&P 500’s
SPX,
8% gain in 2023 and 7.5% decline over the past year.
Credit: marketwatch.com