Tesla Inc. late Thursday filed its annual proxy with securities regulators, laying out five proposals including one clamoring for a “key-person” risk report that the auto maker is asking shareholders to vote against.
Shares of Tesla
TSLA,
were flat in the extended session Thursday after ending the regular trading day down 0.3%. Tesla has scheduled its annual shareholder meeting for May 16 at its Austin, Texas, headquarters.
The request for a key-person risk report is championed by investor Karen Róbertsdóttir in Iceland. The idea is to keep a publicly available report on the key-person risk, “including identification of key persons and actions to ameliorate the impacts of their potential loss.”
“Tesla is frequently cited as a prominent example of a company that has so-called Key-Person Risk, due to the prominence of its CEO and the lack of a clear public succession plan or strategy to ameliorate the impacts of his loss,” the proposal read.
Tesla shareholders “can have little confidence that said risk has been at all ameliorated,” it said, citing Tesla’s on language on a recent filing that it is “highly dependent on the services of Elon Musk, Technoking of Tesla and our Chief Executive Officer.”
Musk officially named himself the Technoking of Tesla as well as its CEO in March 2021.
As expected, Tesla is asking shareholders to reject the proposal, saying that its approval “would cause unnecessary competitive harm to Tesla and undermine our efforts to recruit and retain management.”
