World News | Musk says he won’t resign as Tesla CEO, tells shareholders company will advertise

AUSTIN (USA) , May 17 (AP) – Elon Musk on Tuesday dismissed speculation that he may step down as Tesla CEO, saying at the company’s annual shareholder meeting that the electric car and Solar panel companies will start doing some advertising.

“Say no,” one shareholder asked Musk about stepping down as Tesla’s leader. “It’s not like that,” he replied without further discussion.

Read also | Malawi boat capsizes: Children dead and 23 missing after hippo capsizes canoe in River Shire.

When another shareholder suggested that Tesla try advertising, Musk said he was open to it.

“There’s some merit to that,” he told shareholders at a meeting on the site of Tesla’s factory near Austin, Texas. “We’ll try to do some advertising and see how that goes.”

Read also | Australia road crash: Seven children have been seriously injured after a truck hit a school bus in Melbourne.

Tesla has notoriously avoided paying for advertising like its rivals, relying heavily on Musk’s ability to generate free publicity — he has 140 million followers on Twitter, and the social media company sold for $44 billion last fall. acquired him.

Musk told shareholders that the company’s “full self-driving” software is approaching a level that is safer than human driving. He has previously said the system should be ready this year, a promise he has made for years.

Tesla says on its website that cars cannot drive themselves and humans must be ready to intervene at any time. The company was also forced to recall the software by U.S. safety regulators because it failed to comply with traffic laws in some cases. Issues identified by NHTSA will be fixed through an online software update.

At Tuesday’s meeting, Musk warned that the next 12 months could be challenging for the Austin-based company, largely because rising interest rates have increased the cost of buying a car.

“Tesla is not immune to the global economic environment,” he said, predicting that the company will weather this period and do well, even if many will go bankrupt.

Later on CNBC, he talked about the affordability of Tesla vehicles. “If your car payment or your house payment goes up, you have less money for other things,” he said.

Sometimes the pain of work is “very unbearable,” he told attendees.

He called his time as Twitter CEO a “short-term distraction” and said the company needed open-heart surgery to ensure its survival.

It’s in a stable position now, and he’s happy to have Linda Yaccarino, whom he poached from NBCUniversal, to run Twitter. Musk said he has spent “relatively little” time on Twitter compared to the past six months since he bought the social media platform.

Before Musk spoke, shareholders voted to make Tesla co-founder and former chief technology officer JB Straubel a member of the company’s board for the next three years. Straubel left Tesla in 2019 to start a battery material recycling company.

Shareholders also re-elected Musk and chairwoman Robin Denholm to the board. (Associated Press)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)