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More Insight Into Tesla’s New Board Chair, Robyn Denholm

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Published on December 29th, 2018 |

by Matt Pressman

More Insight Into Tesla’s New Board Chair, Robyn Denholm

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December 29th, 2018 by Matt Pressman

Originally published on EVANNEX.

Questions arose when Tesla announced its new board chair, Robyn Denholm. How might the seasoned executive interface with Tesla’s hard-charging CEO Elon Musk? Richard Walters (via Financial Times) reports that “Ms Denholm has always described herself as direct — the product of a pragmatic Australian upbringing that has left her with a no-nonsense view of the world.”

It’s reported that, “Ms Denholm grew up in Milperra, a small town in Sydney’s sprawling western suburbs. Her parents owned a service station, where she used to pump petrol, do the accounts and repair cars — a pursuit that got her interested in automobiles.” Denholm went on to work at “Toyota in Australia, where she rose to the position of national finance manager and became one of the few women to reach a senior level at the time.”

Later, “Ms. Denholm left Australia for Silicon Valley,” transitioning into the tech sector working with the likes of Sun Microsystems and Juniper Networks. And according to Pierre Ferragu, a Wall Street analyst who covered Juniper Networks, “She has a proven record for dealing with very high-ego individuals.”

Ferragu says, “Robyn is the exact opposite: she can remain very calm, very stable. She is a less visible personality, but she’s very good at driving things without having to be in the lead.” He adds, “She has a quiet self-confidence … very on top of what was happening in the business.”

Denholm was recently named Tesla’s new board chair (Photo by Jakob Härter, CC BY-SA license)

Denholm has taken calculated risks in her career to succeed. “I don’t jump out of planes or bungee jump or any of that stuff,” she told The Australian. “But I do take professional risks. You make the best decisions you can with all the information you have — and you have to move quickly. You’re not pushing hard enough if you never make mistakes.”

Denholm has been on Tesla’s board for four years, serving as non-executive director and chairing the board’s audit committee. In the Australian Financial Review, she was asked about her experience at Tesla and replied, “It’s great, and he [Musk] is great, he’s just phenomenal.”

In turn, Musk has admiration (and praise) for Denholm. He tweeted, “Would like to thank Robyn for joining the team. Great respect. Very much look forward to working together.” According to Tesla, “Robyn will be leaving her role as CFO and Head of Strategy at Telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunications company,” in order to serve as Tesla’s new board chair on a full-time basis.

Denholm describes how “constructive conflict” can improve collaboration (YouTube: Telstra Wholesale)

The road ahead for the electric carmaker won’t be easy. Musk has noted that, “Tesla’s like a drama magnet.” But Denholm welcomes conflict. She’s openly discussed nurturing conflict while “teasing out those ideas” that bring about successful outcomes. At Telstra (see video above), she said, “I actually think conflict is great … I mean constructive conflict where you’ll actually debate around an idea or go backward and forwards on how to iterate on an idea. I think that’s really important.”

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About the Author

Matt Pressman is all about Tesla. He’s a TSLA investor, pre-ordered the Model 3, and loves driving the family's Model S and Model X company cars. As co-founder of EVANNEX, a family business specializing in aftermarket Tesla accessories, he’s served as a contributor/editor of Electric Vehicle University (EVU) and the Owning Model S and Getting Ready for Model 3 books. He writes daily about Tesla and you can follow his work on the EVANNEX blog.

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Meet Kathleen Wilson-Thompson, the HR executive that just joined Tesla’s board following its $20 million SEC settlement (TSLA, WBA)

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Bloomberg: To Catch Up To Tesla, Big Auto Needs “Tricky Financial Stunt”

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Published on December 28th, 2018 |

by Matt Pressman

Bloomberg: To Catch Up To Tesla, Big Auto Needs “Tricky Financial Stunt”

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December 28th, 2018 by Matt Pressman

Originally published on EVANNEX.

As Tesla’s Model 3 continues to gain market share, legacy automakers face some daunting decisions. Bloomberg warns, “The future of the auto industry is going to look like the history of the cell phone … some of today’s dominant car companies will share the fate of a few former titans of the smartphone. Remember BlackBerry, Nokia, and Palm?”

Tesla’s current lineup (Photo by Zach Shahan for CleanTechnica)

“Who will be the winners in the electric car race? Who knows?” said Mike Ramsey, senior director of research at Gartner Inc. “The incumbents could be, or they could be cut out entirely.”

Unlike Tesla, legacy automakers are still dragging their feet when it comes to electric vehicles. Karl Brauer, executive publisher for Autotrader and Kelley Blue Book notes that automakers who ignore electric cars altogether could be “completely left behind. If you ignore it and act like the market is never going to be ready, then you’re setting yourself up for real trouble.”

Making the commitment to an all-electric future, Bloomberg notes, “Tesla Inc. appears to have that advantage … [meanwhile] non-Tesla options in electric vehicles such as the Nissan Leaf, Chevy Bolt, and BMW i3 aren’t selling particularly well.” Furthermore, Bloomberg New Energy Finance analyst Colin McKerracher forecasts, “There will be a very long tail of EV models that don’t sell especially well.”

BMW i3 vs. Tesla Model 3 (Photo by Zach Shahan for CleanTechnica)

There are other challenges too. According to Bloomberg, “for the next decade or so, old-school car executives will try to pull off a tricky financial stunt: driving returns with gasoline engines until their electric models have enough momentum to start keeping pace. They are essentially using an old technology to fund the transition to the next, and the timing is fraught. Jump to the electric drivetrain too soon and the whole works will grind to a halt; jump too late and lose the EV race.”

In contrast, more recent “startups such as Tesla, critically, don’t have to make this awkward jump … they don’t have to worry about feeding a legacy business as it slowly winds down.”

The Silicon Valley automaker has other key advantages too. “At Tesla, the sexy sedan is just the start. The company has thrived, in part, because it deals directly with consumers and allows everyone to build the exact car that they’d like to own. Tesla’s cars are also undergoing constant improvement with over-the-air software updates, essentially scrapping the whole concept of a model year,” reports Bloomberg.

This one. (Photo by Zach Shahan for CleanTechnica)

They literally do everything differently,” Ramsey says. Meanwhile, he contrasts that with incumbent manufacturers who “seem to be thinking of electric vehicles as just changing the powertrain. If there’s a big switch over to EVs, these companies may need to … change the entire way that they think about the market.”

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Australian Autonomous Train Is The “World’s Largest Robot”

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Tesla names Oracle founder Larry Ellison to board as part of SEC settlement (TSLA)

Tesla said in a filing on Friday that it had named two new directors to its board, the Oracle founder Larry Ellison and the Walgreens executive Kathleen Wilson-Thompson, fulfilling the another of its promises from a $20 million settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission in September. In early November, Tesla announced that Robyn Denholm… Continue reading Tesla names Oracle founder Larry Ellison to board as part of SEC settlement (TSLA)

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Tesla adds Larry Ellison, Walgreens exec to board

Tesla adds Larry Ellison, Walgreens exec to boardTesla Inc. added Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson to its board, fulfilling the terms of the settlement reached with U.S. securities regulators over its CEO’s problematic posts about taking the company private.
Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle Corp., and Wilson-Thompson, the global chief human resources officer of Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc., join a board the Securities and Exchange Commission ordered to step up its governance and oversight measures after Elon Musk claimed in August to have had the funding and investor support for a buyout. The chief executive officer relinquished the role of chairman in November, and both he and the company agreed to pay $20 million penalties.
The new additions to the board put a bookend on a months-long distraction that at one point looked like it may cost Musk his future with the company. While reining him in may prove challenging, they’ll help steer a carmaker that’s made significant strides in profitably making and delivering electric vehicles.
Tesla’s shares rose 1.3 percent to $320.26 at 10:11 a.m. in New York after earlier gaining as much as 6 percent. The stock was up 1.5 percent this year through the close Thursday.
Ellison, 74, went off-script during an Oracle meeting with analysts in October to announce that he had been building a personal stake in Tesla and that it was his second-largest holding. He criticized how the media had covered Musk, 47, whom he called a close friend.
“This guy is landing rockets,” Ellison said in October of Musk, who also runs Space Exploration Technologies Corp. “You know, he’s landing rockets on robot drone rafts in the ocean. And you’re saying he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Well, who else is landing rockets? You ever land a rocket on a robot drone? Who are you?”
Tesla said in its statement announcing Ellison would be joining the board that he purchased 3 million shares of the electric-car maker earlier this year.
Tesla’s board now has 11 members, including three women. This fall, California became the first U.S. state to mandate that publicly traded companies have women on their boards. Those with at least seven directors need to have at least three women by 2021.
The SEC moved to punish Tesla and Musk because it alleged he committed fraud by tweeting that he had the “funding secured” to take the company private at $420 a share. The agency said this and other claims the CEO made on Aug. 7 were false and misleading and impacted Tesla’s stock.
Musk and Tesla reached the settlement with the SEC on Sept. 29 that gave the company 90 days to add directors and take other actions. Since then, the CEO has publicly lampooned the agency and bristled at the notion that he’ll change his Twitter habits.
Tesla’s legal department also has been going through shakeups since Musk’s run-in with the SEC.
The company tapped Dane Butswinkas, the Washington trial lawyer who represented the CEO in his legal battle with the agency, earlier this month to become general counsel. He’ll replace Todd Maron, who’s leaving Tesla in January after five years. Before he joined the company, he represented Musk through two divorces.
In November, Phil Rothenberg, a vice president on Tesla’s legal staff, left to became general counsel at Sonder, a hospitality startup. Rothenberg previously worked at the SEC.
Read or Share this story: https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/mobility/2018/12/28/tesla-adds-larry-ellison-walgreens-exec-board/38807445/

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