In addition to what other replies have said, Elon also has pledged some of his stock in order to secure personal loans. He will have to fund margin calls or sell his stock if the stock falls below a certain price.
Elon has used those loans to finance a rather extravagant lifestyle. He own FIVE mansions in Bel Air, all right next to or near each other. He owns a $70,000,000 private jet, a top-of-the-line Gulstream G650 ER, and flies everywhere with it, burning immense amounts of fuel sometimes just commuting within Los Angeles (between Hawthorne and Van Nuys airports, for example). Because his unusual compensation arrangement at Tesla is contingent on the company's increasing market value or maybe someday turning a profit (which has never ever happened), these loans against his Tesla stock are his main bread-and-butter.
In other words, Tesla's fate as a company and its stock price are intimately tied to Elon's personal financial solvency. That's gotta create some conflicts of interest between his various jobs as CEO, head of the Board of Directors, and a person who doesn't want to be personally financially wiped out.
His lifestyle isn't the big problem, IMO. He's not Johnny Depp, he's way richer. That money most be going somewhere else...
OTOH, selling stock to redeem a pledge could be scrutinized for insider trading, and such a large amount could move the stock, so if I were loaning the money, I would require some large multiple of the loan in pledges -- enough so that I would expect not to have to call the pledge, because I know it will be a disaster if I do.
It's close to 13.775M, and growing. The worrying sign is that the company is losing tons of money at the same time. As the author of that article writes:
> So, Musk has steadily increased his personal leverage to a company that has been steadily increasing its financial leverage. That's a double whammy. It's too much financial engineering. In following other companies I have experienced situations in which a CEO faced margin calls as his company's share price dropped. It is not pretty, and obviously adds incremental selling pressure to an existing decline.
It just seems inevitable that the colliding forces of an overleveraged CEO running into an overleveraged company will create some kind of financial implosion.
How does this actually work? His stock is just his collateral for those loans, which can be transferred if he defaults on payments?
"Never ever" as in two profitable quarters? https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/29/tesla-still-isnt-profitable-...