Robyn Denholm’s route to Tesla’s board did not begin in a boardroom. It began with a car. In 2014, Denholm was waiting for a Tesla Model S when she met Brad Buss, then a Tesla director and an associate of Elon Musk. Their conversation eventually moved away from cars. Buss asked whether she would consider joining Tesla’s board.
Denholm accepted and became a director in August that year. She was not coming to Tesla as an automotive specialist. Her career had been built largely around technology, finance and corporate operations. She had held senior positions at Juniper Networks and had earlier worked in finance roles connected to Toyota and Sun Microsystems. That combination became useful at Tesla, where the challenge was increasingly about turning an ambitious electric-car business into a company capable of producing vehicles at much greater scale.
