Tesla board chair made $333 million selling stock as profit fell

Sydney-based Robyn Denholm (also a director of Blackbird Ventures) has made over US$530m from Tesla share sales since 2018. Photo / Getty Images

In March, after a steep decline in Tesla’s share price, Elon Musk told employees: “Hang on to your stock.”

The chair of Tesla’s board, Robyn Denholm, has not heeded his advice. Denholm has made US$198 million ($333m) in the past six months selling Tesla stock that she earned for serving on the board, according to a New York Times analysis of securities filings.

That brings her total profit on the sale of Tesla stock to more than US$530m since becoming the board’s leader in late 2018, far more than her peers have made at the most valuable US companies during that time, the analysis shows.

The share sales raise questions about Denholm’s confidence in Tesla‘s prospects. Her most recent sales, executed under a prearranged trading plan filed last summer, came as Musk, the company’s CEO, took a time-consuming role in the Trump administration. Tesla’s car sales have plunged partly because Musk’s political activities have turned off some car buyers. The company’s quarterly profit fell in the first three months of 2025 to its lowest level in four years.

Denholm earned the right to buy those shares, known as stock options, for serving on the board, a part-time position. Tesla granted the options between 2014 and 2020 and its share price has soared since then, giving Denholm the right to buy shares for a lot less than their current price. Last week, for example, she bought more than 112,000 shares for US$24.73 apiece and sold them the same day for more than US$270.

“To dump her stock, it doesn’t send a message that this is a board chair who is invested in the future of the company,” said the New York City comptroller, Brad Lander, who oversees the city’s five public pension funds. As of March, those funds held more than three million Tesla shares, valued at the time at roughly US$817.

Denholm said in a statement that Tesla paid board members in a manner that was “completely aligned with shareholder interests”.

Denholm has sold more than 1.4 million Tesla shares and continues to hold 85,000 of them and roughly 49,000 stock options, according to the Times analysis. Equilar, a compensation research firm, reviewed the methodology. Her latest wave of stock sales were carried out under the plan she set into motion in July, soon after Musk endorsed Donald Trump for President.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

Written by: Aaron Krolik, Rebecca F. Elliott and Jack Ewing

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