Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) Inc. proposed a three-to-one stock split, which would make its shares cheaper after the most valuable automaker’s shares were sold off recently.
Oracle Corp (NYSE:ORCL) co-founder Larry Ellison, who is friends with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, will not run for re-election to Tesla’s board at this year’s shareholder meeting, the company said.
Ellison is one of the most important investors who has promised money to help Musk buy Twitter Inc. for $44 billion (NYSE: TWTR).
During extended trading on Friday, shares of Tesla, which is based in Austin, Texas, went up by more than 1%. Since Musk announced his stake in Twitter in early April, their prices have dropped by almost 40%. This is partly because of a strict lockdown in Shanghai that has hurt Tesla’s production.
On August 4, Tesla’s shareholders will vote on whether or not to split the stock. If approved, it would be the first time the company did something like this after it split into five parts in August 2020.
Tesla said that the split would give its employees “more options for managing their equity” and make its stock “easier for our retail shareholders to buy and sell.”
Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL), Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), and Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) all recently split their shares.
Even though a split doesn’t change the way a company works, it could raise the share price by making it easier for more investors to buy the stock.
Tesla will also ask its shareholders to decide if the terms of its board of directors should be cut from three to two years. If the terms were approved, they would be spread out over two years.
UNION
The shareholder proposals, on the other hand, include things like employees’ rights to form a union and Tesla’s efforts to stop sexual harassment and racial discrimination.
According to a stockholder proposal cited in Tesla’s filing, “In 2021, the National Labor Relations Board upheld a 2019 ruling that Tesla illegally fired a worker who was trying to organise a union and that the CEO had illegally threatened workers about unionizing.”
Musk asked the United Auto Workers (UAW), a union of auto workers, to hold a vote at Tesla’s factory in California in March. But the proposal said, “Tesla does not have any formal policy commitments to respect the right to freedom of association, nor has it shown how it would effectively carry out such a commitment.”
The proposal was voted down by Tesla’s board, which said the company recently raised the base pay for manufacturing jobs and is “actively engaged” in protecting workers’ rights.
After a series of lawsuits, shareholders also wanted an annual report on what Tesla was doing to stop sexual harassment and racial discrimination.
A civil rights group in California filed a lawsuit against Tesla, saying that the company did nothing for years to stop widespread racist behaviour at its Fremont assembly plant.
Tesla said that it does not “allow discrimination, harassment, retaliation, or any other kind of bad treatment of employees at work.”
In another resolution, Tesla was asked to figure out “how its current use of arbitration affects the number of cases of harassment and discrimination in its workplace.”
Shareholders also asked the company to tell them about its policies to fix what they thought was a lack of gender and racial diversity on its board.
