The money and drugs that tie Musk to some Tesla directors

Board members at Elon Musk’s electric car maker, Tesla, were facing a dilemma.

- Kirsten Grind

One longtime director, the venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, had left his firm after an internal investigation found he had slept with multiple women in the tech industry and used illegal drugs.

Some of the details had been splashed across the press in 2017, and Tesla directors informally discussed how they should handle it, according to people familiar with the situation. Some urged him to resign.

Luckily, Jurvetson, even though the company designated him an independent director, had a good friend with whom he had deep financial ties and also attended parties with, using ecstasy and LSD: Musk.

Musk pushed directors in private conversations to allow Jurvetson to take an unusual leave of absence from the board of the public company, and then step down on his own accord in 2020, the people said. Jurvetson remains a director at Musk's privately held rocket company, SpaceX.

"The answer was do nothing and see what happens," said another former independent Tesla director and good friend of Musk's, Antonio Gracias, in a 2021 court deposition, when asked how the board handled the Jurvetson situation. Gracias and his venture-capital firm held investments recently valued at about $1.5 billion in Musk companies.

Multiple other directors of Musk companies have deep personal and financial ties to the billionaire entrepreneur, and have profited enormously from the relationship. The connections are an extreme blurring of friendship and fortune and raise questions among some shareholders about the independence of the board members charged with overseeing the chief executive. Such conflicts could run afoul of the loose rules governing what qualifies as independence at publicly traded companies.

On Tuesday, a Delaware judge struck down Musk's multibillion-dollar pay package at Tesla, saying board members who signed off on it in 2018 were beholden to Musk.