SAN FRANCISCO — Friday begins a new age for Tesla Inc.’s board and Elon Musk’s Twitter feed.
The company added Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson to its board of directors, fulfilling the terms of the settlement reached with U.S. securities regulators over its CEO’s problematic posts about taking the company private.
Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle Corp., and Wilson-Thompson, the global chief human resources officer of Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc., join a board the Securities and Exchange Commission ordered to step up its governance and oversight measures after Musk claimed in August to have had the funding and investor support for a buyout.
The carmaker already complied with the SEC’s order to name a new chairman by tapping existing director Robyn Denholm to take over from Musk in November.
The new additions to the board put a bookend on a months-long distraction that at one point looked like it may cost Musk his future with the company. While reining him in may prove challenging, they’ll help steer a carmaker that’s made significant strides in profitably making and delivering electric vehicles.
Tesla’s shares rose 1.3 percent to $320.26 at 10:11 a.m. after earlier gaining as much as 6 percent. The stock was up 1.5 percent this year through the close Thursday.
Ellison, 74, went off-script during an Oracle meeting with analysts in October to announce that he had been building a personal stake in Tesla and that it was his second-largest holding. He criticized how the media had covered Musk, whom he called a close friend.
“This guy is landing rockets,” Ellison said in October of Musk, who also runs Space Exploration Technologies Corp. “You know, he’s landing rockets on robot drone rafts in the ocean. And you’re saying he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Well, who else is landing rockets? You ever land a rocket on a robot drone? Who are you?”
Tesla said in its statement announcing Ellison would be joining the board that he purchased 3 million shares of the electric-car maker earlier this year.
Tesla’s board now has 11 members, including three women. This fall, California became the first U.S. state to mandate that publicly traded companies have women on their boards. Those with at least seven directors need to have at least three women by 2021.
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