Two CEOs of high-profile American companies received rare public votes of no-confidence from their boards of directors this week, just as attendees at Compliance Week’s 20th Anniversary National Conference discussed their role in upholding business ethics and executive accountability.
On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Tesla’s board of directors had “reached out” to executive search firms to begin a formal process of finding the company’s next CEO. The move, which Tesla’s leadership later denied, followed sinking share prices and some investor complaints its current CEO Elon Musk was spending too much time advising President Donald Trump and the White House on government cost-cutting and other political issues. Around the same time as the WSJ report, Kohl’s announced it had fired its newly installed CEO after five months in the job, because he’d ”violated company policies” and ethics around conflicts of interest.
