Tesla Board -chairman Robyn Denholm earned $ 198 million selling in shares when the profit fell

In March, after a steep decrease in the stock price of Tesla, Elon Musk told employees: “Wait to your stock.”

The chairman of the board of Tesla, Robyn Denholm, did not follow his advice. For the past six months, Mrs. Denholm has earned $ 198 million with the sale of Tesla shares that she earned for serving the board, according to an analysis of the New York Times of securities applications.

That brings her total profit on the sale of Tesla shares to more than $ 530 million since he became the leader of the council at the end of 2018, much more than her colleagues made at the most valuable American companies at the time, the analysis shows.

Sharing sales raises questions about the trust of Mrs. Denholm in the prospects of Tesla. Her most recent sale, carried out under a pre-agreed trading plan that was submitted last summer came when Mr. Musk, the Chief Executive of the company, played a time-consuming role in the Trump administration. The car sales of Tesla have fallen partially because Mr. Musk’s political activities have eliminated some car buyers. The company’s quarterly profit fell to the lowest level in four years in the first three months from 2025.

Mrs. Denholm earned the right to buy those shares, which is known as stock options, for serving the board, a part -time position. Tesla granted the options between 2014 and 2020, and the share price has since risen, so that Mrs. Denholm has the right to buy shares for much less than their current price. Last week, for example, she bought more than 112,000 shares for $ 24.73 each and sold them the same day for more than $ 270.

“To dump her shares, it does not send a message that this is a chairman of the board who will be invested in the future of the company,” said the New York City Comptroller, Brad Lander, who supervises the five public pension funds of the city. From March, those funds had valued more than three million Tesla shares, at that time at around $ 817 million.

A spokesperson for Mrs. Denholm said that Tesla paid board members in a way that was ‘fully tailored to the interests of the shareholders’.

“The reason that the value of the options of the Tesla directors has increased is because Tesla has surpassed his industrial colleagues and created major returns for the owners of the company, the shareholders,” he said in a statement.

Stock options, which have compiled most of the reimbursement of Tesla directors for years, are only valuable if the company’s share price rises, as Tesla did. Those who exercise their options to buy company shares can sell or hold their new shares.

Mrs Denholm has sold more than 1.4 million Tesla shares and, according to the Times analysis, 85,000 of them and about 49,000 stock options continue to have. Equilar, a compensation consultancy, assessed the methodology. Her last wave of stock sales was carried out under the plan that she started in July, shortly after Mr. Musk Donald J. Trump had endorsed President.

According to securities regulations, managers and other insiders can use such plans to trade shares in their companies. They are not obliged to disclose many details of their plans, including the reason for them or the conditions under which shares will be sold. They also have a lot of leeway to cancel the plans.

Mrs. Denholm was born in Australia and veteran technology -director, has maintained a low profile and rarely speaks publicly about Tesla or Mr. Musk. She was recruited in 2014 at the Tesla Board and appointed chairman in 2018 After Mr. Musk agreed to resign From the position under a settlement at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

She and other board members were criticized by some investors, activists and a Delaware judge because they did not serve as counterweights for Mr. Musk, who is generally seen as brash and impulsive. Tesla directors have also been accused because he did not succeed in ensuring that he remains focused on Tesla.

“Musk works as if free from the Council”, Chancellor Kathalen St. J. McCormick from the Delaware Court of Chanery wrote last year when she ruled in favor of a shareholder who had challenged Mr Musk 2018’s wage package, with a value of approximately $ 56 billion. Judge McCormick described in that decision, Mrs. Denholm’s style to supervise Mr. Musk as ‘poor’.

Tesla appealed against the decision that Mr.’s wage package. Musk has wosted, and Mrs. Denholm has pushed back on the criticism of Judge McCormick.

“Everyone who knows me knows that I am not convenient now that I know what that word means,” Mrs. Denholm told the Financial Times last year. “It’s probably the furthest in the truth. I am really intense and very diligent in what I do.”

During the trial about the wage of Mr. Musk, Mrs. Denholm described the money she had earned from her Tesla Board Service as a ‘life -changing’. Director Pay at Tesla was subject to a separate lawsuit that Mrs Denholm and other board members settled in 2023.

Mr. Musk, who has long been Tesla’s part -time chief executive, has taken on even more responsibilities over the years. He has become a regular presence in Washington, which means that President Trump’s efforts to defeat government spending and to beat employees of the federal government.

Mr. Musk recently said he would do that Lower his time in Washington Up to one or two days a week. However, his attention will probably remain divided, because he also leads various other companies, including SpaceX and X, the social media site that he owns.

The first sale of Mrs. Denholm under her recent trading plan took place in November, the week after the presidential election, because the stock price of Tesla climbing. The stock reached a new high point a few weeks later, in December. She continued to sell until the beginning of May, because the company was confronted with the recoil of consumers about the political activities of Mr. Musk and the share price dropped.

The shares now fall around 34 percent compared to his peak after repairing part of his losses in recent weeks.

Mr. Musk acknowledged the difficulties of Tesla during a meeting with business staff in March. “If you read the news, it feels like, you know, Armageddon,” he said half joke.

He continued to advise employees not to sell their shares and said that Tesla would become the most valuable company in the world, because it perfectly perfect for self -driving taxis and robots that look like and move like people. “The future is incredibly rosy,” he said.

The sale of Mrs. Denholm has far surpassed it by other Tesla directors, with the exception of Mr. Musk, who stayed in the board after he was taken as chairman.

She and other current and former Tesla board members agreed to arrange a lawsuit to the shareholders about their wages in 2023, with it jointly taking agree to return a fee with a value of $ 735 million. They denied misconduct. Stock options with a value of more than $ 130 million were canceled on 1 May to meet the obligations of Mrs. Denholm under that settlement, according to securities applications.

Board members agreed in June 2021, after that lawsuit had been filed, to abandon new stock exchanges.

Mrs. Denholm also earned more money to sell the shares of her company than the leaders of other company councils in the same period. The Times assessed the sale of shares through administrative chairs at the most valuable American companies that, like Mrs. Denholm, are not managers at those companies.

The non-cutlery chairman with the second highest profit in the sale of shares in the company he is holding was Stephen Hemsley of UnitedHealth Group. Mr Hemsley has earned more than $ 100 million since November 2018 on the sale of UnitedHealth shares, although he received all those shares while he was Chief Executive from the health care company.

UnitedHealth Group confirmed the findings, but refused to comment. On Tuesday, the company announced that Mr Hemsley would reclaim the Chief Executive lane, in addition to serving as chairman.

The sale of managers and directors often predict poor performance by the companies they lead, has discovered what academic research has discovered.

Leaders such as Mrs Denholm have access to non -public information and a deep insight into how broader economic forces can influence business performance. That can make their transactions particularly profitable, according to Nejat Seyhun, a professor in finance at the University of Michigan.

Insiders’ set up plans when they have information, “said Professor Seyhun. If the conditions change, “they can cancel those plans.”