Denmark’s AkademikerPension is dropping Tesla from its investment universe over employee rights issues and because CEO Elon Musk has "increasingly interfered" in politics, telling the firm it has just one more chance to retain the 145 billion Danish kroner ($20.1 billion) pension fund as a shareholder.
The Gentofte-based pension fund is selling its remaining 200 Tesla shares, worth $48,000, and putting the company on its exclusion list — meaning internal and external managers may not buy any Tesla stock. That change will happen after the automotive and clean-energy company’s general meeting in June, where AkademikerPension has put forward a proposal to allow employees to form and join trade unions.
Although the pension fund has said it would cancel the divestment and exclusion if the proposal passes, the expectation is that it will not pass, a spokesman said.
“It’s no secret that Tesla has been a market leader in the green transition for years,” CEO Jens Munch Holst said in a translation of a news release. “But when we can tick off a long list of issues year after year with no prospect of improvement — in fact, quite the opposite — it’s hard to argue that we should remain invested.”
The pension fund cited three main reasons for exclusion. The first is that Tesla has been “working against employee labor rights for years and has a long history of union resistance and workplace discrimination,” the news release said. The second is that, in the opinion of AkademikerPension, Tesla has “major challenges regarding board independence and is undoubtedly the megacap stock with the least independence on the board, which literally consists of friends and family.”
The final reason is that “it is impossible to talk about Tesla without talking about Elon Musk,” its CEO and co-founder. AkademikerPension took the firm to task for the fact that Musk has “increasingly interfered in American and European politics. He has publicly supported controversial political figures, spread misinformation and criticized governments. This has created major risks to returns, as many investors and customers have turned their backs on the company. In short, Elon Musk is, in our opinion, destroying the brand and the value,” the release said. Musk is now also senior adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump.
AkademikerPension has tried to get changes made to the company for years, Holst said in the release. “But sometimes you have to realize that the desired change is too far away or there is no prospect of it. And that is the situation with Tesla,” he said, adding that the hope is the company can at some point be invested in again by the pension fund. “But it requires some fundamental and structural changes that I am not immediately optimistic will take place in the near future,” Holst said.
Tesla has been contacted for comment.
