Elon Musk went full Trump in a late-night all-caps tirade on X, slamming a Wall Street Journal report that claimed Tesla was actively seeking to replace him as CEO.
The Murdoch family-owned publication—which has regularly criticized Trump during his first 100 days back in office—reported Wednesday night that the eight-person Tesla board had contacted multiple executive search firms to initiate the hunt for a new leader while Musk was busy with his cost-cutting task force, DOGE.
Musk, who is himself a member of the board, got the message and publicly committed more of his time to the company he has run for 20 years. In response, the search was scaled back and the board worked with just one search firm, the Journal reported.
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Musk reacted to the report on X at around 1:30 a.m. Eastern Thursday morning. Channeling his inner Trump, he hit the “caps lock” button and fired off a couple of strongly worded posts contesting the story.
In the first, he quoted a message from a Tesla spokesperson dismissing the report, adding: “It is an EXTREMELY BAD BREACH OF ETHICS that the @WSJ would publish a DELIBERATELY FALSE ARTICLE and fail to include an unequivocal denial beforehand by the Tesla board of directors!"
The Journal cited “people familiar” with the purported search for a successor.
“WSJ is a discredit to journalism,” Musk added in a later post.
A Tesla spokesperson, in a statement after the report was published, said the story was false and that the Journal was made aware of that pre-publication.
“Earlier today, there was a media report erroneously claiming that the Tesla Board had contacted recruitment firms to initiate a CEO search at the company,” Robyn Denholm said.
“This is absolutely false (and this was communicated to the media before the report was published). The CEO of Tesla is Elon Musk and the Board is highly confident in his ability to continue executing on the exciting growth plan ahead.”
A Wall Street Journal spokesperson contradicted Tesla in a statement given to the Daily Beast on Thursday.
“We stand by our reporting. Tesla was given the opportunity to provide a statement before publication, which they did not do,” the spokesperson said.
It is not the first time the Journal has found itself at loggerheads with President Donald Trump and his allies. The right-leaning newspaper’s editorial board has recently criticized the president’s Ukraine policy and his decision to remove security protection for former staffers.
A Journal editorial called Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on global trading partners the biggest “mistake in decades” and on Monday, in an editorial to mark the first 100 days of Trump’s second term in office, the paper warned him that a “major reset” was needed.
In an earnings call with Tesla investors last month, Musk announced that he would scale back his time with DOGE to just one or two days a week starting in May.
“There’s been some blowback for the time that I’ve been spending in government with DOGE,” he acknowledged.
The announcement came after Tesla reported that its profits had plummeted by 71 percent in the first quarter of 2025 on slumping sales in key markets around the world. The carmaker earned $409 million in the first three months of the year, down from $1.4 billion over the same period in 2024.
