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It’s not a great time to be a Tesla shareholder. While the stock was up 2.5% in midday trading on Tuesday, July 8, it remains down for the month and has lost nearly 25% of its value over the past six months. In most companies, such a performance would have senior executives tugging at their collars and glancing nervously over their shoulders. But Elon Musk, Teslas CEO, isnt showing any signs of concern, at least not publicly. Despite being the worlds richest man, Musk is not untouchable at Tesla. He is the largest shareholder, with a 12.75% stake, but that doesnt grant him voting control. (Compare that to Mark Zuckerberg, who owns 13% of Meta’s stock but holds 50% of the total voting power due to a dual-class share structure.) In theory, if shareholder and board patience wore thin, Musk could be ousted. Whether that would ever actually happen is another matter entirely. For now, Musks position appears secure, but investor patience is certainly being tested. On Teslas April earnings call, Musk promised to dedicate more time to the company after spending much of the first quarter engaged in political matters in Washington, D.C. However, his recent launch of the America Party and ongoing battles with President Trump have further agitated shareholders. (Tesla did not respond to Fast Companys request for comment.) Longtime Tesla bull and Wedbush analyst Dan Ives delivered an unusually sharp critique of the company on July 8, warning that Musks political distractions could cost Tesla up to $1 trillion in autonomous vehicle sales. We believe the board now has to take the bull by the horns, Ives wrote in a note to investors. He outlined three recommendations for the board: Assemble a new pay package for Musk that would give him 25% voting control, paving the way for a potential merger between Tesla and xAI. Include in that package a clear expectation for how much time Musk must spend at Tesla. Set limits on Musks involvement in political matters. Some general guardrails on this front would help everyone involved, including institutional investors, retail investors, Musk himself, the Board, and Tesla employees around the world, Ives wrote. Musk responded on X to Ivess note on Tuesday, writing simply: “Shut up, Dan.” Shut up, Dan— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 8, 2025 Ives isnt the only analyst raising concerns. On the same day as Ivess post, Morgan Stanley cautioned that investors should be prepared for further devotion of resources (financial, time/attention) in the direction of Mr. Musk’s political priorities which may add further near-term pressure to [Tesla] shares. Whether Teslas board will act is unclear. It has faced long-standing criticism for being too closely aligned with Musk. Critics point to the $56 billion pay package approved in 2018 and the board’s lack of action in response to Musks controversial behavior online and elsewhere. Musk’s personal ties to the boardwhich includes his brother, Kimbal Musk, and Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbiahave further fueled these concerns. Theres also the question of whether the board could act independently without near-unanimous shareholder support. A lawsuit in Delaware Chancery Court over Musks pay package revealed that Tesla requires a supermajoritytwo-thirds of shareholdersto make significant changes at the company. That said, the idea of replacing Musk has at least been explored. In May, The Wall Street Journal reported that Teslas board had contacted executive search firms to initiate a formal CEO search process. Tesla denied the report, stating on X: 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, according to Tesla chair Robyn Denholm. Regardless of whether that report was accurate, investors have reason to be uneasy. The companys market cap has fallen from $1.5 trillion in December to $945 billion, and Musks attention continues to be divided. “The biggest asset for Tesla is Musk . . . and they have never needed him more than today,” Ives said on CNBC on Tuesday afternoon. “They need to show, from an investor perspective, that there is a pilot on the plane.”
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E-Commerce
Seven years ago, your grocers dairy section became visually fantastical. You might not remember how sterile it used to be: the shelves were once dominated by similarly drab, white Greek yogurt cups that delivered on practical, nutritional performance. But truckload by truckload, the shelves transformed into a ripely colorful, whimsical, and idyllic play land of Chobanis making. The company had just undergone a monumental rebrand under the direction of designers Lisa Smith and Leland Maschmeyer, and they doled out a new design world in thousands of 5.3 ounce portions. Who knew a product like high-protein Greek yogurt could turn design off minimalism? But soon, a cohort of expressive, personality-driven, maximalist copycats emerged. Cooper Black was the new black. Smith had never been averse to stylistic shake-ups, if a brand mission calls for it. Shed rebranded the Met while at Wolff Olins; later at the design agency JKR, she satiatingly rebranded Burger King. Following six years as global executive creative director JKR, where she also rebranded Mozilla, Fanta, Impossible, and Walmart, Smith is moving to the smaller, multifunctional creative studio Uncommon as its first-ever global chief design officer, with another simple but groundbreaking idea: to expand what branding encompasses. Here, Smith explains why holistic teams that include advertising and marketing creatives are the real way to push design forward, why handoff should happen after launch day, and how she plans to build a renegade team that goes beyond just delivering guidelines. Ive always been a little bit messy, she says. This conversation has been condensed and edited. [Image: Chobani] Fast Company: You just joined Uncommon as global chief design officer. How is this different from your role at JKR? I’ve been at JKR for six years, which out of anywhere I’ve ever worked, that’s the longest. I’ve deliberately chosen a path where I didn’t have my own agency. I don’t want that responsibility. I just want to focus on the work and working with talent. I’d had my eyes on Uncommon for quite a while. I got to meet Nils about four years ago when we were both judging Cannes Lions, and then the following year we were both presidents. So we got to meet a couple of times, and that was the beginning of me following what they’re doing, which is very much talking about brands in a much more contemporary way. More and more, the traditional way the branding agencies [work], it stops at guidelines and you’re out. JKR is a very rare, unusual company. That’s what kept me there the longest. When I joined, it was very famous, and was doing beautiful CPG packaging. A lot of people were like, why are you going to JKR? They’re a packaging agency. And I was like, no, people don’t realize they’re doing brand identities. Tosh [Hall] gave me a brief that we were the best kept secret, and beyond that, it was really to expand the identity beyond food and packaging into other categories, whether that was entertainment with Paramount or sports or the tech I was working on with Mozilla. So it expanded. When you start working on those, that’s almost another dimensionality in terms of brand identity: the skills you need, the team you need to curate. So I love that it kept me wildly busy for six years. I was really, really invested. [Image: Mozilla] But in truth, I was just hankering, like, how can I start to do things beyond just delivering guidelines and the traditional expectations of a rebrand, into experiences, environments, and product design? I felt a bit like I was treading water. I knew how to do it. I wanted someone to push me again to do things. I want to be pushed and make awesome stuff. I want to be able to curate weird and wonderful creatives from all aspects of design, not just traditional brand system designers. I want to be able to play with a lot more types of creatives and that’s very similar to what I got to do at Chobani with Kwame [Taylor-Hayford] and Leland [Maschmeyer]. So it’s taking that model and expanding it more.
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E-Commerce
As global temperatures increase because of climate change, glaciers around the world are meltingcontributing to rising sea levels, more extreme weather events, and habitat loss for all sorts of species. But scientists have recently identified another explosive consequence from this disappearing ice: Melting glaciers may lead to more frequent, and more damaging, volcanic eruptions. Those volcanic eruptions could then cause even more climate impacts by spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which will then melt more glaciers. Though individual volcanic eruptions may temporarily cool global temperatures (by releasing aerosols that reflect the sun away from the Earths surface), multiple, consecutive volcanic eruptions can actually contribute to global warming. This creates a positive feedback loop, where melting glaciers trigger eruptions, and the eruptions in turn could contribute to further warming and melting, Pablo Moreno-Yaeger, a University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher, said in a statement. Moreno-Yaeger presented his teams findings at the geochemistry Goldschmidt Conference in Prague this week; a peer-reviewed paper on the research is forthcoming. Melting glaciers increase volcanic activity because of the way they sit over stores of magma underground. When ice sheets melt and glaciers retreat, it releases the pressure on those magma chambers, making it easier for the magma to break through the surface in a volcanic eruption. That process has already been observed in Iceland, but the new study looking at volcanoes in Chile is one of the first to show how the phenomenon played out at the end of the last ice age. The last ice age peaked around 26,000 to 18,000 years ago, and the thick layer of ice over the planet then suppressed volcanic eruptions. That led a reservoir of magma to build up below the surface. When the ice sheets melted, the loss of all that heavy ice released the pressure over the magma, making the gases in the magma expand so that they erupted from the Earths surfacelike popping the top of a soda can. For the study, the researchers, with funding from the National Science Foundation, looked at rocks around six volcanoes in the Chilean Andes. They were able to date previous volcanic eruptions and analyze the chemistry of these rocks to track how volcanic explosions increased as glacial ice melted. The key requirement for increased explosivity is initially having a very thick glacial coverage over a magma chamber, and the trigger point is when these glaciers start to retreat, releasing pressure, Moreno-Yaeger explains. This activity is currently happening in places like Antarctica, where more than 100 volcanoes sit below the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. The entire Antarctic Ice Sheet covers an area larger than the U.S. and Mexico combined. Climate change, fueled by the burning of fossil fuels, is already causing Antarctic ice to melt more quickly than it can be replacedand at a rate six times faster than it was melting in the 1990s. The West Antarctic Ice sheet specifically is the frontier of dramatic ice loss in Antarctica, and one of the most rapidly changing ice sheets on the planet, according to the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition. Its not just Antarctica that could see more volcanic eruptions because of melting ice. The researchers say scientists should monitor parts of North America, New Zealand, and Russia for this risk as well. The impact isnt immediate, though; in the Chilean Andes, the volcanic eruptions lagged a few thousand years behind the melting glaciers. But the researchers warn that different volcanoes, made up of different minerals, could respond to this change over a different amount of time. And its not the only climate impact that could be increasing volcanic activity. Previous research has found that more extreme, heavy rainwhich is also increasing because of climate changecould trigger eruptions. And once those eruptions increase, they create a feedback loop that causes even more warming and rain.
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E-Commerce
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