Tesla chair Robyn Denholm on working with Elon Musk
In an exclusive interview for The List: 100 Innovators 2023, Tesla chair Robyn Denholm opens up on working with the world’s most enigmatic — and unpredictable — tech billionaire.
Tesla chair Robyn Denholm says Australian business needs to consider failure a “stepping stone to success” and three decades of virtually uninterrupted economic growth has “muted” local risk appetite.
“If you’re not failing, you’re actually not pushing the envelope far enough or fast enough,” Denholm tells The Australian in an interview for this year’s edition of the The List: 100 Innovators 2023, published online and in print on Friday.
“That permission or that ability to fail actually enables you to take more risk because you feel protected and safe as opposed to you know, if I fail, I lose my job or I fail I lose everything.”
Denholm says that mentality is still the main difference she sees between doing business here or in the US, where founders “pick themselves up and actually try again. That is still a muscle we are developing in Australia”.
Denholm is best known in Australia as the chair of global giant Tesla, founded and run by chief executive Elon Musk, probably the world’s most famous entrepreneur thanks to not only Tesla but also personal investments like his US44bn ($66bn) purchase of Twitter, his SpaceX rocket venture and his stint as the world’s richest person.
While generally reluctant to talk in much detail about Musk, Denholm admits that waking up each morning to the latest headlines her CEO has attracted on the other side of the world can be somewhat enthralling.
“There’s never a dull moment. Isn’t there a proverb about how you’re blessed if you have an interesting life? I have an interesting life,” Denholm says dryly.
She says the company’s progress has been supercharged by having a founder and people across the business who are prepared to take risks.
“Whether that’s on the engineering side, the business side, the societal side, the board side, you’ve got to have people who are willing to do that. I don’t mean take uncalculated risks or do things that are completely crazy, but to me most risks are worth taking. If nothing else, you’ve learnt from them.”
Denholm adds that she believes Tesla is an “underdog” given it is at the vanguard of the push towards mass adoption of electric cars, even with market capitalisation of almost $US800bn ($1.2 trillion), and it represents a “new form of capitalism”.
“It is … where the purpose of the company is far bigger than the company itself; to drive some sort of change in the status quo and really put large objectives out there – and I think that’s healthy,” she says.
“I think it’s the new form of capitalism, I like to call it, because it’s good companies doing really good things and it’s a virtuous cycle because those companies then prosper and they’re able to actually create that change for everybody.”
Denholm herself has taken plenty of risks during her career, having grown up in Sydney’s working-class southwest as the daughter of parents who bought a petrol station when she was aged seven.
She moved to the US in 2001 with Sun Microsystems, a newly single mother with then 13 and eight-year-old children and heading to a job she wasn’t sure she could do – but Denholm would rise through the ranks to eventually become chief operating officer.
“You’re not going to find me jumping out of a plane or skydiving … but from a business point of view, my view is you assess the risk and if you can live with the consequences of something not going right then you go for it.”
The List: 100 Innovators 2023 launches online and in The Australian on Friday, September 15.
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