Tesla (TSLA) shareholder’s meeting news hub

Fred Lambert | Oct 7 2021 - 11:20 am PT

Tesla (TSLA) is holding its annual shareholder’s meeting at Gigafactory Texas in Austin today at 5:30 p.m. ET.

Here’s a news hub with all the important news coming out of the event.

Tesla Shareholder’s Meeting 2021

Tesla’s shareholder’s meetings start with votes on official items, which this year include re-electing two directors, James Murdoch and Kimbal Musk.

Musk is the brother of CEO Elon Musk and a long-time member of the board.

Murdoch, the son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch and former CEO of Fox, is facing his first re-election and he is controversial amongst Tesla investors.

Tesla also wants to reduce director terms to two years.

Shareholders will also be voting on a few investor proposals, including more transparency about employee arbitration on workplace culture.

This will be interesting given the recent order for Tesla to pay $137 million to a former employee over facing racism at his job in Tesla’s Fremont factory.

There are also three other proposals regarding culture at Tesla – The board is recommending shareholders vote against all of them, which generally leads to the proposals being shut down.

Tesla Annual Presentation and Q&A

After the formal voting part, Tesla generally moves on to a presentation by Elon Musk and other management. Tesla is expected to talk about the progress they have made over the last year and share plans for the next year, including manufacturing ramps, product lineup, and more.

Following the presentation, Tesla will take questions from investors through the website say.

Here are some of the most upvoted questions that Tesla is expected to answer:

Does Tesla plan to offer any dividends to its shareholders in next 2 years?
With $TSLA stock price back into the $700-800 range, and likely heading higher. Would you consider another split to allow retail investors to continue adding shares at a decent, per share, price.
Is there any guidance on when Cybertruck production will begin and at what rate the ramp up will happen?
Are we going to see 4680 battery cell this year in Texas? If not what part of production is holding up?

Honestly, the questions are not great this year. The answer to the first one is likely no as Tesla has always indicated its plan to reinvest profits into its growth. While dividends are not out of question in the future, it’s not likely in the next two years.

As for the second question, Tesla could do another stock split, but the reason of allowing smaller investors to get involved is becoming less valid as more and more stockbrokers are offering fractional shares, like Robinhood in the US and Wealthsimple in Canada.

The third top-voted question has been answered just recently when Tesla indicated that Cybertruck production will start in late 2022.

The last one is the most interesting, as Musk warned that 4680 cells might not be available at the start of Model Y production at Gigafactory Texas.

We should get all those answers in just a few hours.

You can watch Tesla’s shareholder’s meeting live here: