Tesla Chairwoman Robyn Denholm has sold over $50 million worth of stock in 2024
Robyn Denholm, chairman of Tesla Inc., speaks during an American Chamber of Commerce in Australia event in Sydney, Australia, on Wednesday, March 27, 2019.
Brendon Thorne | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Tesla Chairwoman Robyn Denholm has just sold $17.3 million worth of her shares in the electric vehicle maker, according to a filing Monday, bringing her total stock sales this year to more than $50 million.
Denholm, who joined Tesla’s board as an independent director in 2014 and became chair four years later, sold the shares as part of what’s called a 10b5-1 program put into place in October. She has now sold all of the 281,116 shares allowed in the agreement.
While Denholm still has the vast majority of the 1.66 million shares she owned as of the end of last year, according to the company’s proxy filing, her stock sales follow hefty selling from other big stakeholders. Former Tesla Senior Vice President Drew Baglino, who announced his resignation in mid-April, sold shares worth around $181.5 million soon after his departure, according to a filing.
Another Tesla board member, Kathleen Wilson-Thompson, set up a 10b5-1 trading plan in February 2024, for the potential sale of up to 280,000 shares by or before Feb. 28, 2025.
Tesla shares are down 26% this year, closing Monday at $184.76. The slide comes as the company faces increased competition, weakened demand for its EVs and a drop in first-quarter deliveries.
CEO Elon Musk has tried to focus investors’ attention on the company’s self-driving future instead of its core automotive business. He told investors on Tesla’s earnings call last month that those who doubt the company’s ability to deliver self-driving vehicles should stay away from the stock. For years, Tesla has been working to develop, but hasn’t brought to market, software that will make its existing cars autonomous, a dedicated robotaxi and humanoid robots capable of factory work.
“If somebody doesn’t believe Tesla’s going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company,” Musk said on the call.
In Denholm’s early years on the Tesla board, she served on the audit committee. She eventually replaced Musk as chair in November 2018, after the company struck an agreement with the SEC to settle civil securities fraud charges requiring Musk to relinquish that role temporarily, among other provisions.
The SEC had charged Musk and Tesla with securities fraud after Musk said, in a series of tweets in 2018 that he was considering taking the company private at $420 per share with “funding secured.” The tweets led to a stretch of volatility in Tesla shares.
Before joining the Tesla board, Denholm served in executive roles at Sun Microsystems, and in finance roles at Toyota in Australia and at accounting firm Arthur Andersen. Denholm is currently part of Tesla’s audit, compensation, nominating and corporate governance, and disclosure controls committees.
Denholm, who didn’t respond to a request for comment, is a named defendant in a shareholder lawsuit — Tornetta vs. Musk — that was decided in January. The judge in the Delaware case ruled that Tesla’s 2018 CEO pay plan, which was the largest in public corporate history, was only allowed by a board that was “beholden to Musk,” and should be rescinded.
In her opinion, Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick wrote that by serving on Tesla’s board, Denholm received “life-changing” compensation, which “far exceeded the compensation she received from other sources.”
Denholm’s latest stock sales coincide with struggles at Tesla and a broad restructuring effort that’s included thousands of layoffs.
Demand for Tesla’s EVs slumped in the first quarter, and inventory levels have visibly swelled. Revenue in the period fell 9% from a year earlier, the steepest drop since 2012, while net income plunged 55%.
Musk said in an internal memo in April that Tesla was cutting more than 10% of its global headcount. He didn’t say which departments or locations would be most affected. In the earnings call, he referred to the restructuring as a “pruning exercise” and added, “We’re not giving up anything that is significant that I’m aware of.” He said that if the company organizationally is “5% wrong per year,” its cumulative inefficiency comes out to 25% or 30%.
Denholm and Musk are currently trying to convince shareholders to vote with directors and executives at Tesla on a number of proxy proposals.
The most material proposal asks shareholders to return to Musk his compensation package that was invalidated by the Delaware Chancery Court in the Tornetta decision. The pay package would be worth tens of billions of dollars in Tesla shares to Musk.
Tesla’s largest individual retail shareholder, tech billionaire Leo Koguan, has repeatedly called for investors to vote against the plan. In a post on X, Koguan recently wrote, “Don’t be a sucker, just vote NO.”
Alexandr Wang, CEO of ScaleAI speaks on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 23, 2025.
Gerry Miller | CNBC
Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang told employees in a memo on Thursday that he’s leaving for Meta, confirming reports from earlier in the week about his departure and a large investment from the social networking company.
Meta is pumping $14.3 billion into Scale AI as part of the deal, and will have a 49% stake in the artificial intelligence startup, but will not have any voting power, a Scale AI spokesperson said.
“As you’ve probably gathered from recent news, opportunities of this magnitude often come at a cost,” Wang wrote in the memo that he shared on X. “In this instance, that cost is my departure. It has been the absolute greatest pleasure of my life to serve as your CEO.”
Scale AI is promoting Jason Droege, the chief strategy officer, to the CEO role. Droege was previously a venture partner at Benchmark and an Uber vice president.
A small number of Scale AI employees will also join Meta as part of the agreement, Wang wrote.
A Meta spokesperson confirmed that the company has finalized its “strategic partnership and investment in Scale AI.
“As part of this, we will deepen the work we do together producing data for AI models and Alexandr Wang will join Meta to work on our superintelligence efforts,” the spokesperson said. “We will share more about this effort and the great people joining this team in the coming weeks.”
Meta’s big bet on Wang fits into CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s plans to bolster his company’s AI efforts amid fierce competition from OpenAI and Google-parent Alphabet. Zuckerberg has made AI his company’s top priority for 2025, but has grown increasingly frustrated with his team, particularly as Meta’s latest version of its flagship Llama AI models received a tepid response from developers, CNBC reported earlier this week.
Although Zuckerberg has traditionally placed long-standing employees into high-ranking position, he decided that the outsider Wang would be better suited to oversee AI initiatives deemed crucial for the company.
Scale AI counts a number of Meta rivals as customers, including Google, Microsoft and OpenAI. Meta is one of Scale AI’s biggest clients.
The Scale AI spokesperson said that Meta’s investment and hiring of Wang will not impact the startup’s customers, and that Meta will not be privy to any of its business information or data.
Larry Ellison, Oracle’s co-founder, chief technology officer and chairman, at right, and U.S. President Donald Trump share a laugh as Ellison uses a stool to stand on as he speaks during a news conference in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington on Jan. 21, 2025. Trump announced an investment in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and took questions on a range of topics including his presidential pardons of Jan. 6 defendants, the war in Ukraine, cryptocurrencies and other topics.
Andrew Harnik | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Oracle shares soared 13% on Thursday to a record close, after the database software vendor issued robust earnings and a strong forecast, fueled by growth in cloud.
Revenue climbed 11% year over year during the fiscal fourth quarter to $15.9 billion, topping the $15.59 billion average estimate, according to LSEG. Adjusted earnings per share of $1.70 exceeded the average analyst estimate of $1.64.
“All told, ORCL has entered an entirely new wave of enterprise popularity that it has not seen since the Internet era in the late 90s,” Piper Sandler analysts wrote in a note to clients. The firm was one of several to lift its price target on the stock, raising its prediction to $190 from $130.
Oracle has been making headway in the cloud infrastructure market to challenge Amazon, Google and Microsoft. It’s still small by comparison, with $3 billion in cloud revenue during the May quarter, compared with over $12 billion for Google, which counts productivity software subscriptions and cloud infrastructure sales when reporting cloud metrics. But Oracle’s business is growing faster.
Future expansion can also come from sales of Oracle’s database on clouds other than its own.
“The growth rate in multi-cloud is astonishing,” Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison said on Wednesday’s conference call with analysts. “In other words, our database is now moving very rapidly to the cloud, I think because – a few reasons, because the database has now all these AI capabilities, but also, quite frankly, now people can get it in whatever cloud they want.”
Remaining performance obligations, a measurement of money that’s expected to be recognized as revenue in the future, sat at $138 billion, up 41% from a year earlier. Oracle CEO Safra Catz said RPO will likely more than double in the 2026 fiscal year, which ends in May 2026. Revenue for the new fiscal year should come in above $67 billion, she said. That’s higher than LSEG’s $65.18 billion consensus.
Gains from OpenAI’s Stargate artificial intelligence data center project, targeting $500 billion in investments over four years, are not yet included in forecasts.
“If Stargate turns out to be, everything is advertised, then we’ve understated our RPO growth,” Ellison said.
For fiscal 2029, revenue should be above the $104 billion target the company set in September, Catz said.
Still, the company faces the challenge of meeting client demand in cloud.
“Demand continues to dramatically outstrip supply,” Catz said, though she added that the company isn’t having trouble sourcing Nvidia graphics processing units.
Analysts at RBC, who recommend holding the stock, raised their price target to $195 to $145. But they noted that, “with the backdrop of continued capacity constraints, we struggle to see a path to meaningful acceleration in the near term.”
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