No. of Recommendations: 5
But seriously, the following will be just as effective:
On Tuesday, a group of Democratic New York state senators sent a letter urging the New York state comptroller to divest the state pension fund’s position in Tesla amid the company’s stock volatility. And last month Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, sent a letter to some of the union’s biggest asset managers asking them to review Tesla’s current valuation.
“We don’t want the retirees to be holding the bag,” Weingarten told me. “Here you have us being really concerned about retirement security and about pensions, and a lot of it triggered because Tesla holdings are a big piece of a lot of retirement systems.”
Weingarten stressed that this was purely about protecting union members’ retirement funds, not about politics. But it’s hard to read it that way. The #TeslaTakedown movement has taken off among critics of the administration who view it as one of the only effective ways to make the president and his copilot feel a modicum of pain for the policies they’ve pushed.
“We need to make sure our pension fund is stellar and represents good corporate governance,” New York state Senator Patricia Fahy, who spearheaded the letter to the comptroller, told The Bulwark in a phone interview. “But also, the goal is to bring attention to somebody who I think is raising a lot of concerns, the CEO Elon Musk, on a whole host of issues at the federal level.”
