Tesla foil

Batty but brilliant Elon Musk has denied reports James Murdoch, soon to be in a nepotism-free jobless zone, will be chairman of Tesla. The chairmanship of the battery and electric car business is up for grabs after the United States Securities and Exchange Commission said that because Elon was making so many dotty statements he must replace himself with an independent chair.

Murdoch is already a director of Tesla and floated the idea that he would be ideal for the job.

He had also wanted to replace Bob Iger as chief executive of Disney once it beds down the Fox takeover, but Lord Moloch scotched that one, saying: “I made it a condition of the deal that Iger would stay on.”

It’s a shame Elon has declared via Twitter that reports of James taking the helm are not true. As Lord Gnome in Private Eye points out, what better corporate leader could be found than the man in charge of News International when the hacks at News of the Screws were running riot with hacking, blagging, bribing and blackmailing.

The British watchdog found that his “exercise of responsibility was less than we would expect to see exhibited by a competent chief executive officer”.