China’s massive rollout of renewable energy is accelerating, its investments in the sector growing so large that international climate watchdogs now expect the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions to peak years earlier than anticipated—possibly as soon as this year.

China installed 217 gigawatts worth of solar power last year alone, a 55% increase, according to new government data. That is more than 500 million solar panels and well above the total installed solar capacity of the U.S. They appeared everywhere from the deserts of Inner Mongolia to the mountains of southwest China to rooftops across the country, including on the Great Hall of the People on the edge of Tiananmen Square.

Wind-energy installation additions were 76 gigawatts last year, more than the rest of the world combined. That amounted to more than 20,000 new turbines across the country, including the world’s largest, planted on towers in the sea off China’s east coast.

The low-carbon capacity additions, which also included hydropower and nuclear, were for the first time large enough that their power output could cover the entire annual increase in Chinese electricity demand, analysts say. The dynamic suggests that coal-fired generation—which accounts for 70% of overall emissions for the world’s biggest polluter—is set to decline in the years to come, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency and Lauri Myllyvirta , the Helsinki-based lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

China’s expanding renewables footprint is shaping the global response to climate change. Its companies are the leading manufacturers of clean-energy technology, from solar panels and wind turbines to electric vehicles. That is stoking concerns in the rest of the industrialised world about depending on China for their energy supplies in the future.

At the same time, China’s deployment of renewables at home is breathing new life into international climate diplomacy . Its rapid emissions growth long provided fodder for critics who said Beijing wasn’t committed to fighting climate change or supporting the Paris accord , the landmark climate agreement that calls for governments to attempt to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial temperatures. Now, analysts and officials say Beijing’s efforts are lending momentum to the Paris process, which requires governments to draft new emissions plans every five years.

“An early peak would have a lot of symbolic value and send a signal to the world that we’ve turned a corner,” said Jan Ivar Korsbakken, a senior researcher at the Oslo-based Center for International Climate and Environmental Research.

In 2020, Chinese leader Xi Jinping pledged that the country’s emissions would begin falling before 2030 and hit net zero before 2060, part of its plan prepared under the Paris accord. He also said China would have 1,200 gigawatts of total solar- and wind-power capacity by the end of this decade. The country is six years ahead of schedule: China reached 1,050 gigawatts of wind and solar capacity at the end of 2023, and the China Electricity Council forecast last month that capacity would top 1,300 gigawatts by the end of this year.

“China’s acceleration was extraordinary,” said Fatih Birol , the executive director of the Paris-based International Energy Agency.

Chinese authorities publish regular data on energy consumption and generation but not overall greenhouse-gas emissions. Transition Zero, a U.K.-based nonprofit that uses satellite images to monitor industrial activity and emissions in China, says the official data are “broadly aligned and consistent” with theirs.

Once the peak arrives, some analysts expect an emissions plateau to follow rather than a rapid fall in the following years. That is a problem, scientists say, because the world’s major emitters must sharply cut global emissions this decade—by 43% compared with 2019—to fulfill the Paris accord.

Climate Action Tracker, a scientific consortium that evaluates governments’ emissions plans, rates China’s current policies as “highly insufficient” to meet the 1.5 degrees Celsius goal . Its latest analysis, published in November, says China’s emissions should peak by 2025. If wind and solar installations can average 300 gigawatts a year—as they did last year—China’s emissions should fall significantly by the end of the decade, the consortium says. The actions and policies of the U.S., where emissions have been falling, were graded as “insufficient.”

Still, moving China’s timeline for an overall emissions peak forward could shave off around 0.3 to 0.4 degrees Celsius of projected global warming if emissions started to decline next decade, analysts say. Emissions plans submitted to date under the Paris accord would put the world on track to warm by 2.5 degrees Celsius this century, a United Nations Environment Program report said in November.

China is still building coal-fired power plants , fuelling criticism from Western officials that it is locking in carbon-dioxide emissions years into the future. Beijing has been telling Western officials that the new plants won’t be as polluting as they fear. They are replacing older, higher-emitting plants, and will run far below full capacity, used largely to maintain electric-grid stability as China generates more of its power from intermittent wind and solar. In November, China unveiled a system of capacity payments for coal-fired plants that will allow them to earn money even when they are running as backup power sources. Xi said in 2021 that China would begin to phase down its coal consumption starting in 2026.

The exact timing of China’s peak depends on factors such as economic growth and weather in the next few years, analysts say. Growth is expected to slow following China’s real-estate sector slump —unless Beijing undertakes a major new program of economic stimulus that would boost industrial emissions. Another spell of drought this summer would push the country’s coal plants to run harder to replace lost hydropower generation.

The most certain variable in the equation is the breakneck pace of China’s renewable-energy rollout, which analysts expect will continue to add 200 to 300 gigawatts of new wind and solar capacity a year. The investments in renewable energy have become a major driver of the Chinese economy. The country’s clean-energy spending totaled $890 billion last year, up 40%. Without that growth, investment in China would have been flat as the country reels from the slump in its real-estate sector, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

The investments include clean-energy installations and the construction of enormous factories to produce solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and electric vehicles—turning the country into the leading manufacturer of clean tech. Its factories in those sectors now have plenty of unused capacity . The adoption of electric vehicles is happening so rapidly that analysts say peak gasoline demand in China was already reached last year.

At the United Nations COP28 climate conference in Dubai in November, Xie Zhenhua , then China’s climate envoy , said the government would calculate the year and absolute volume of the country’s emissions peak. He also said Beijing is drawing up its next emissions plan under the Paris accord.

“Our country will do as it’s said and strive to do even better,” he said. “I have faith.”

Clayton Wiles, a truck driver in North Carolina, earns about 20% more than three years ago. Kristine Funck, a nurse in Ohio, has won steady pay raises, built retirement savings and owns her home. Alfredo Arguello, who opened a restaurant outside Nashville when the pandemic hit, now owns a second one and employs close to 50 people. But ask any of them about the state of the American economy, and the same gloominess surfaces. “Unstable” is how Arguello describes it. Said Funck:

“Even though I’m OK right now, there’s a sense it could all go away in a second.”

There’s a striking disconnect between the widely shared pessimism among Americans and measures that show the economy is actually robust. Consumers are spending briskly —behaviour that suggests optimism, not retrenchment. Inflation has tempered . Unemployment has been below 4% for 24 straight months, the longest such stretch since the 1960s. The disconnect has puzzled economists, investors and business owners. But press Americans harder, and the immediate economy emerges as only one factor in the gloomy outlook.

Americans feel sour about the economy, many say, because their long-term financial security feels fragile and vulnerable to wide-ranging social and political threats. Reliable steps up the economic ladder, such as a college degree, no longer look like a good investment. War overseas, and an emboldened set of hostile nations, have made the world feel dangerous.

Uninspiring leaders at home, running a government widely seen as dysfunctional, have left people without hope that America is up to the challenge of fixing its problems. The broad reasons for America’s dim outlook suggest that even further improvement in the economy might not be enough to lift the nation’s mood.

In an election year, that is shaping up as one of President Biden’s biggest impediments to winning a second term. He has received little credit so far for an economy that has foiled predictions of a recession and instead grew 3.1% in the past year, far ahead of the pace in 2022. By some metrics, that improvement is starting to give way to slightly rosier views of the economy. Consumer sentiment, as measured by the University of Michigan, recently posted the biggest two-month increase since 1991 .

Yet it remains about 20% lower than during the robust economy of early 2020, just before the Covid-19 pandemic started, and it stands at about levels typically seen at the end of a recession rather than in an economy posting solid growth. Interviews with Americans across the country—some affluent, some just scraping by; some with advanced degrees and others with blue-collar jobs; some Republican, some Democrat—show they are weighed down by fears of an unpredictable world in which no one in government or business is competent to steer the nation through precarious times.

“You could argue unemployment is 3.7%, but who cares with this level of uncertainty?” said Arguello. “Because that’s what people are feeling. They’re not feeling hope. They’re not feeling one country. They’re feeling a divisive, divided United States of America.”

No ‘coherent plan’

Theresa Foster estimates her family’s net worth is up because the value of their home in suburban Albany, N.Y., has risen around 20% since the pandemic started.

“But every time I go to the store I am shocked by the prices,” said Foster, who earns more than $200,000 combined with her husband’s income. “I feel like we’re on really thin ice, that it’s really fragile, that neither political party has any theoretical foundation for what they want to do with the economy.”

Foster, 57, earned a master’s degree on GI Bill benefits and works part time at a nonprofit, while her husband works full time in human resources. To her, the notion that cooling inflation should ease her financial worries is akin to telling a person who is bleeding out that the flow of blood has slowed.  What upsets her, she said, is that the government continues to spend money while racking up blunders, such as the botched withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan. None of that instills confidence in leaders’ ability to handle other complex issues.

“I feel like no matter what they tell me about the economy, they don’t really know, because they don’t have a coherent plan,” she said.  The coming election has left her dispirited about the likely nominees, President Biden and Donald Trump , whom she calls “Loser 1 and Loser 2.”

Foster voted libertarian in the last two presidential elections in protest and was registered independent until she recently registered as a Republican to vote against Trump in New York’s presidential primary in April. Funck, the nurse in Milford, Ohio, said she sees the country’s decline in the high number of uninsured and unhoused patients whom she cares for at a large Cincinnati medical centre.

“The politicians seem to be making out really good and then everybody else is struggling,” said Funck, who is 52 and an independent voter who backed Biden in 2020.

She earns about $90,000 a year, had her student loans forgiven after two decades, and has no children to support. Still, she constantly fears she’ll be derailed by an unexpected expense, and worries that the wars in Gaza and Ukraine could push up the prices of oil and grain.  After her mortgage and car payments, groceries and utility bills, there’s very little left over, she said. She’s prioritised saving for retirement “because I’m not expecting Social Security to be around, and I have to be able to support myself.”

Economic cracks

While many groups of Americans have made gains during the pandemic recovery, some cracks have emerged.  Americans in lower-paying industries saw some of the strongest pay raises in recent years, but wage growth is now slowing overall, and more so for these workers.

Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found that low-income households disproportionately bear the brunt of inflation , in part because of the high share of their income that goes toward food, gas and rent.  While inflation has cooled substantially from its peak in 2022, wage growth only began to outpace price increases in mid-2023 , meaning many Americans are still reeling from a long stretch in which it felt like their earnings couldn’t go far enough. The unemployment rate remains at near-record lows, but layoffs have hit some sectors of the economy with force, including technology and some other white-collar fields, such as accounting and media.

James Welch, a married father of two, moved his family from Atlanta to Plano, Texas, to take a job as a manager at an online fitness company after he was laid off early in the pandemic from a hotel company. Last July, he was laid off again. Welch, 49, said he’s depleted close to $450,000 in retirement and emergency savings in recent years to fund the move, medical expenses and costs for two children in college. His wife’s salary of roughly $72,000 annually as an operations manager is keeping the family afloat.  Welch said he thinks he was the victim of cost-cutting moves at the company. He said shortly after he was laid off, he saw his job reposted for lower pay.

Mood mismatch

To many economists, the negative outlook doesn’t reflect the current economic life of most Americans.

“There’s some justification for some negativity about the economy, but nothing resembling the amount of negativity seen in some of the survey data,” said Jason Furman , a top economic adviser to President Barack Obama.

Furman said that, historically, inflation and unemployment levels have been predictors of consumer sentiment, and that the recent spate of rising prices had unsettled consumers.

“It’s just not a good enough reason for them to be as down on the economy as they say they are,” he said.

Many Americans point to structural changes in the economy that have left them anxious about the future. The decline of company pensions has shifted more of the risk of funding retirement from employers to workers. And many who once thought they could count on a college degree as a ticket into the middle class now question its value.

Amy Bos, 44, a married mother of three in Jackson, Mich., said she wouldn’t necessarily recommend college for her 18-year-old daughter. Bos herself returned to college in her 30s to help her upgrade from a job as a pharmacy technician to higher-paying work in human resources, which roughly doubled her pay to $30 an hour. But she said she sacrificed immensely to pay off $41,000 in student loans, which she did only recently.

“A lot of people go to college and either don’t work in their degree field or get a lot of debt for a job that doesn’t have the ability to make very much money,” Bos said.

Some 78% of Americans said they aren’t confident their children’s lives will be better than their own, a Journal-NORC survey found last year. That’s a record in surveys dating to 1990. Only 36% said the American dream— the idea that anyone can get ahead with hard work —still holds true, down from 53% who had said so about a decade earlier, another Journal-NORC poll found. In Wilmington, N.C., the Wiles family feels like they’re sliding backward financially despite pay raises and frugal habits.

Clayton, 44 years old, makes $10,000 more than he did three years ago in his job as a tow-truck driver, bringing the family’s annual income to $58,000. But the Wiles can’t afford to fix their broken-down truck and plan to draw from modest retirement savings to pay for health insurance for their two children when they lose Medicaid eligibility this year.

Haleigh, 30, is in school to become a teacher, but worries that even the addition of an extra salary won’t enable them to start saving for a down payment on a house.  The combination of higher borrowing costs and higher home prices has made buying a home much less affordable. New 30-year fixed-rate mortgages, though down about a percentage point from last fall, are close to 7%, compared with under 3% three years ago. The increase in rates means a borrower typically has to pay hundreds of dollars more a month for a house that costs the same.

“I don’t think the American dream still exists,’’ said Haleigh. “I don’t think it’s attainable anymore. Because you need money to make money, and I think you either start out ahead or you’re constantly playing catch-up now.”

Political skew

One factor in the downbeat outlook is that many Americans view the economy through a political lens. Their opinion is more optimistic when the party of their choice holds the White House. In the weeks before the 2016 election, only 11% of Republicans rated the economy as excellent or good, CNBC polling found. That jumped to 26% right after the election, even before Donald Trump was sworn in as president, and rose to 73% within a year. By contrast, Democratic views of the economy turned more negative over the same period.

Some analysts find signs that the partisan skew in views of the economy is particularly powerful now, with Biden in the White House, because Republicans are more likely than Democrats to adopt a negative view when their party is out of power.

“We find that Republicans cheer louder when their party is in control and boo louder when their party is out of control,’’ wrote Stanford University economics professor Neale Mahoney, who held White House positions under Biden and Obama, and Ryan Cummings, a Ph.D. student, in a November Substack posting.

By statistically “adjusting the decibel level’’ so that the two parties cheer equally, they found that about 30% of the gap between consumer sentiment and what would be predicted by the economic data could be explained by what they called “asymmetric amplification” of consumer sentiment according to a person’s political party.

In a complementary study, two Brookings Institution analysts found that news about the economy reported in legacy news media—big-city papers such as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal—has been more negative than what would be predicted by actual measures of the economy. The San Francisco Fed’s index of daily news sentiment, which measures the positive or negative outlook of economic stories in news publications, had correlated well for several decades with measures of unemployment, gross domestic product, inflation and stock prices, according to research by Ben Harris, who was the top economist in the Biden administration’s Treasury Department, and Aaron Sojourner.

But in 2018, news sentiment turned more negative than the economic fundamentals, and the negativity gap has widened during the Biden administration. The study didn’t include broadcast media, such as Fox News or MSNBC, that are widely seen as tilted toward one party or the other. Nor did it prove that negative news caused lower consumer sentiment.

Michael Strain , director of economic policy studies at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said that the economy as people experience it in their daily lives explains most of the disconnect. While he sees some mismatch between sentiment and economic fundamentals, he believes that the corrosive impact of inflation accounts for much of it given its broad reach and because people became accustomed to very small price increases in recent years.

“When people say they don’t feel good about the economy, we should believe them,” Strain said.

‘Dark clouds’

Arguello, the Nashville-area restaurant owner, got into the food-service industry in May 2020, early in the pandemic. After ending a 30-year career at General Electric , where he was most recently a senior executive, the 65-year-old decided to buy and operate a burger franchise with his son, a recent college graduate, as a way to teach him how to run a business while deepening his own roots in his community after years of travel.

The Mooyah burger franchise they opened was successful enough that they opened a second location. Fourth-quarter revenues in 2023 were 15% higher than in the prior year, Arguello said. Despite his personal success, Arguello said he believes that “the light at the end of the tunnel is not there yet” for a nation emerging from the pandemic and its high-inflation trauma. Many other nearby restaurants have recently closed, he said, and more broadly, he’s concerned that America is suffering because political leaders are putting their party’s needs above the country’s.

“You have this political instability, a world that is very unstable, with this economic uncertainty,’’ said Arguello, who is originally from Nicaragua. He considers himself right-of-centre politically and would vote reluctantly for Trump this year if he is the GOP nominee. “What people are sensing is not whether the inflation is becoming moderate,” he said. “It’s that the dark clouds remain.”

Would work be better if we all took a collective coffee break?

Workers in Sweden certainly think so. There, work life has long revolved around fika, a once- or twice-a-day ritual in which colleagues put away phones, laptops and any shoptalk to commune over coffee, pastries or other snacks. Swedish employees and their managers say the cultural tradition helps drive employee well-being, productivity and innovation by clearing the mind and fostering togetherness.

Now, as bosses and workers elsewhere try to reinvigorate office life and flagging job satisfaction, fika fascination is seeping into other workplaces.

The Grand, a New York-based career and leadership coaching platform, summons its all-remote staff of 10 every other Friday for coffee and conversation over Zoom. London-based Hubble, a website for finding flexible workspaces, took up the tradition after being introduced to it by a Swedish staff member.

“Everyone has an excuse to log off and let their hair down,” said Tushar Agarwal, chief executive of Hubble, where staff gather the last Thursday of every month for baked goods, chitchat and, of course, coffee.

A recent product offering—for part-time office space with new contract terms—sprang from a discussion that took place during fika, says chief of staff Charlie Bastier. It’s now one of the fastest-growing revenue streams, he says.

Not a Starbucks run

The pressure to make tweaks to the daily ritual is particularly acute in the U.S. Employees continue to report feeling less engaged in their jobs than in pre pandemic times, Gallup data show.

In addition, bonding with colleagues has become harder and less of a priority for many people in the hybrid world of work. Some employers worry the lack of social cohesion is harming company culture and operations.

At The Grand’s regular fika, staffers take turns hosting, leading with casual conversation or a board game such as Code Names or a drawing competition. The Grand’s co-founder Rei Wang says that fika allows her to spend time with her staff, making her a better leader.

“Learning more about their passions and their geniuses helps me understand and collaborate with them,” she says.

Pronounced “fee-kah,” the Swedish culture of breaking for coffee involves much more than a schlep to Starbucks. It’s meant to be a deliberate pause to provide space and time for people to connect. Many Swedish companies build a mandatory fika into the workday, while the Embassy of Sweden in Washington holds one for staff weekly. IKEA, promoting its Upphetta coffee maker on the corporate website, extols the virtues of fika: “When we disconnect for a short period, our productivity increases significantly.”

“Fika is where we talk life, we talk everything but work itself,” said Micael Dahlen, professor of well-being, welfare and happiness at the Stockholm School of Economics. The ritual helps drive trivsel, he says, a term that means a combination of workplace enjoyment and thriving. The concept is so fundamental to Swedish workplaces that many companies in Sweden have trivselcommittees, he said.

Dahlen said he suspects a pandemic-era drop in office fikas contributed to a sharp decline in Swedes’ happiness at work. Just over half of workers in Sweden reported a high level of job satisfaction in 2022, according to Eurostat, compared with 69.5% in 2017.

A productivity booster

There’s some evidence that communal coffee breaks help boost productivity. In a study of call-centre workers at Bank of America, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that teams that scheduled 15-minute breaks together were 18% more communicative with one another through the workday than groups with staggered breaks.

Annual turnover, likewise, was 12% among teams that held collective coffee breaks versus 40% among other workers. In all, the teamwork fostered via the breaks led to an estimated $15 million in increased annual productivity, says lead researcher Ben Waber.

“People who are in a tight knit social group have higher levels of trust,” said Waber, who has since founded a behavioural analytics company called Humanyze.

Hubble employees take turns baking and get a stipend of about $20 for supplies for the company’s monthly fikas. Last week, 26 staff members gathered in a communal area away from desks and cubicles.

Kate Mehigan, an account manager, brought in homemade arancini balls and Eliot Dixon, an account team lead, laid out a Basque cheesecake from a recipe he’d found online. Some people played ping pong.

Fleur Sylvester, a Hubble account executive, used the time to quiz a colleague on training advice for running a half-marathon. Sylvester says when she joined the company over a year ago the gatherings were invaluable for helping put faces to names.

“You get an opportunity to speak to other team members that you don’t get to talk to on a day-to-day basis,” Sylvester said. “When you’re online you don’t get the opportunity to have those chats.”

Peter Linder, head of thought leadership in North America for Swedish telecom giant Ericsson, recently introduced the fika concept to Jason Inskeep, senior director at management consulting company Slalom. The two men had initially met on a joint panel discussion, and Linder wanted to congratulate Inskeep on his new job at Slalom. He sent Inskeep a Zoom invite for a 20-minute fika one-on-one.

“I didn’t know what it was,” Inskeep said.

The vibe of the midmorning conversation—which meandered from the future of artificial intelligence to Inskeep’s own feelings navigating a new company culture—was different from the usual business tête-à-têtehe said. Bouncing ideas back and forth in a relaxed way left him feeling energized the rest of the morning.

“It was a mix of coffee shop and barber shop,” he said.

Board members at Elon Musk’s electric-car maker, Tesla, were facing a dilemma.

One longtime director, the venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, had left his firm after an internal investigation found he had slept with multiple women in the tech industry and used illegal drugs.

Some of the details had been splashed across the press in 2017, and Tesla directors informally discussed how they should handle it, according to people familiar with the situation. Some urged him to resign.

Luckily, Jurvetson, even though the company designated him an independent director, had a good friend with whom he had deep financial ties and also attended parties with, using ecstasy and LSD: Musk.

Musk pushed directors in private conversations to allow Jurvetson to take an unusual leave of absence from the board of the public company, and then step down on his own accord in 2020, the people said. Jurvetson remains a director at Musk’s privately held rocket company, SpaceX.

“The answer was do nothing and see what happens,” said another former independent Tesla director and good friend of Musk’s, Antonio Gracias, in a 2021 court deposition, when asked how the board handled the Jurvetson situation. Gracias and his venture-capital firm held investments recently valued at about $1.5 billion in Musk companies.

Multiple other directors of Musk companies have deep personal and financial ties to the billionaire entrepreneur, and have profited enormously from the relationship. The connections are an extreme blurring of friendship and fortune and raise questions among some shareholders about the independence of the board members charged with overseeing the chief executive. Such conflicts could run afoul of the loose rules governing what qualifies as independence at publicly traded companies.

On Tuesday, a Delaware judge struck down Musk’s multibillion-dollar pay package at Tesla, saying board members who signed off on it in 2018 were beholden to Musk.

Several current or former directors at Tesla and SpaceX attend parties with him, go on exotic vacations and hang out at Burning Man, the Nevada arts and music festival.

Musk and these directors, including venture capitalists Gracias and Ira Ehrenpreis, tech mogul Larry Ellison, former media executive James Murdoch, as well as Musk’s brother, Kimbal Musk, have invested tens of millions of dollars in each other’s companies—Ellison held billions of dollars in Tesla shares with about a 1.5% holding in 2022. Some also received career support and help from Elon Musk.

Most members of Tesla’s current eight-person board have amassed shares worth hundreds of millions of dollars from their seats over the years, significantly more than what board members at other companies make for their service.

Tesla pays its directors mostly in stock options, and the current board, not including Musk himself, collectively has made more than $650 million selling shares from those options. They hold additional options valued at nearly $1 billion. Some directors agreed to return a portion of that compensation to Tesla to resolve a shareholder lawsuit about their compensation while denying any wrongdoing. A judge has yet to approve the settlement.

Some current and former Tesla and SpaceX directors have knowledge of Musk’s illegal drug use but haven’t taken public action, according to people who have witnessed the drug use or were briefed on it.

The Wall Street Journal reported in January that Musk has used drugs including cocaine, ecstasy, LSD and magic mushrooms, and that leaders at Tesla and SpaceX were concerned about it, particularly his recreational use of ketamine, for which Musk has said he has a prescription. The illegal drugs violate strict anti drug policies at Musk’s companies and could put SpaceX’s federal contracts and Musk’s security clearance at risk.

At the upscale Austin Proper Hotel, Musk has attended social gatherings in recent years with Tesla board member Joe Gebbia, the Airbnb co-founder and a friend of his, where Musk took ketamine recreationally through a nasal spray bottle multiple times, according to people familiar with the drug use and the parties.

Other directors, Gracias, Jurvetson and Kimbal Musk, have consumed drugs with him, according to people who have witnessed the drug use and others with knowledge of it.

Musk and some people close to him, including Kimbal Musk, attend parties at Hotel El Ganzo, a boutique hotel in San José del Cabo, Mexico, known for its art and music scene as well as drug-fuelled events, according to people familiar with the parties.

The volume of drug use by Musk and with board members has become concerning, some of these people said.

In the culture Musk has created around him, some friends, including directors, feel there is an expectation to consume drugs with him because they think refraining could upset the billionaire, who has made them a lot of money, some of the people said. More so, they don’t want to risk losing the social capital that comes from being close to Musk, which for some feels akin to having proximity to a king.

Musk and his lawyer, Alex Spiro, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In response to the Journal article in January about Musk’s illegal drug use, Spiro said Musk is “regularly and randomly drug tested at SpaceX and has never failed a test.”

After that article, Musk tweeted that in three years of undergoing random drug testing after a pot-smoking incident in 2018, “Not even trace quantities were found of any drugs or alcohol. @WSJ is not fit to line a parrot cage for bird [poop emoji].” He later tweeted: “If drugs actually helped improve my net productivity over time, I would definitely take them!”

Tesla’s general counsel and a SpaceX spokesman didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Ellison offer

Some board members worry about the negative effects of Musk’s behaviour on the six companies he oversees and the roughly $800 billion in assets held by investors, according to people close to Musk.

Despite the concerns, the Tesla board hasn’t investigated his drug use or recorded their worries into official board minutes, which could become public.

Around the winter of 2022, Musk’s good friend and former Tesla board member, Ellison, urged him to come to his Hawaiian island to relax from work and dry out from the drugs, according to people familiar with the offer.

The outreach came as friends and others close to Musk worried that his drug use was getting worse, and some asked him to go to rehab, some of the people said.

Around the same time as the Ellison offer, Musk attended a party in the Hollywood Hills where he consumed a liquid form of ecstasy from a water bottle, according to a person who was there. Musk’s security guards asked people to leave the floor of the house for privacy before Musk took the drug.

Across Silicon Valley, executives sometimes invest in each others’ companies and ventures, and might have one or two personal friendships on a company board, especially before it goes public.

Musk, because of the extent of his personal and professional board ties and the enormous amount of money involved, is the most prominent example of a chief executive who is intertwined with directors. The Journal traced connections by reviewing hundreds of pages of court documents and depositions, Securities and Exchange Commission filings and other public records.

The amount Tesla pays its directors is far more than the average compensation for boards at most U.S. companies. The average total compensation for board members in the largest 200 U.S. companies was $329,351 in 2023, according to a new report from the National Association of Corporate Directors and compensation consultant Pearl Meyer. By comparison, current Alphabet board members hold stock valued at about $8 million, and received an average annual compensation for board service of about $475,000 since 2015.

Beyond board pay, some Tesla and SpaceX directors have tens of millions of dollars in additional investments in Musk’s companies, including his brain implant startup, Neuralink, and his tunnelling venture, The Boring Co.

Musk, in turn, invests in some directors’ companies. Board members also have invested in Kimbal Musk’s Kitchen Restaurant Group and in SolarCity, a company run by Musk’s cousins that was acquired by Tesla.

Governance experts, such as longtime board members and advisers to boards, say the personal and financial ties could muddy directors’ views, and that it is highly unusual at U.S. public companies.

According to the rules of Nasdaq, where Tesla trades, an independent director can’t be an employee, a family member or someone whose relationship “would interfere with the exercise of independent judgment.” Nasdaq requires a majority independent board.

While rules governing independent directors across the country are murky, financial entanglement is one area where courts have sometimes found public companies at fault for claiming directors’ independence while they hold investments tied to one another.

Amalgamated Bank, which managed around $180 million of investments in Tesla as of September, signed a shareholder letter last year asking Tesla board members to step up their “meagre oversight” of Musk.

The investors expressed concern that the close ties between Musk and several Tesla directors make the board ill-equipped to act in the best interest of shareholders.

CEO with leeway

Some directors view Musk as a once-in-a-generation genius, with a brilliant mind and unusual methods. In depositions and courtroom testimony, directors have said they think Musk’s leadership is crucial to both Tesla and SpaceX, and believe in his long-held mission to colonise Mars. He is seen as the soul of his companies and intertwined with their success. Tesla’s stock is up more than 300% in the past four years, but has dropped about 25% since the beginning of January.

When striking down Musk’s pay package on Tuesday, the Delaware Court of Chancery judge called the process for approving it “deeply flawed” and cited Musk’s “extensive ties” to some of the directors who negotiated it. A Tesla shareholder had sued, alleging Musk played too big a role in deciding his own pay.

Musk “enjoyed thick ties with the directors tasked with negotiating on behalf of Tesla, and dominated the process that led to board approval of his compensation plan,” wrote Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick in the opinion. She described board Chair Robyn Denholm’s approach to her oversight obligations as “lackadaisical.”

Tesla board members can appeal the decision to the Delaware Supreme Court. After the ruling, Musk posted on X saying, “Never incorporate your company in the state of Delaware” and said Tesla would hold a shareholder vote about incorporating in Texas.

Board members had signed off on the pay deal in 2018, with Tesla valuing it at a maximum of $55.8 billion. It was the biggest pay package ever to the chief executive of a U.S. public company, according to governance-data firm Equilar.

While negotiating the pay package, Musk emailed the company’s top lawyer explaining how he would use the additional compensation. “The added comp is just so that I can put as much as possible towards minimising existential risk by putting the money towards Mars,” Musk wrote. Ehrenpreis, a yearslong friend, was head of the board’s compensation committee.

Company directors frequently allowed Musk an unusual amount of leeway on issues big and small.

After he bought Twitter in 2022, for example, Musk tapped Tesla employees to review the social-media platform’s engineering talent. Also around that time, SpaceX signed off on an unusual $1 billion loan to its chief executive, the Journal has reported.

A 2018 settlement with the SEC, following Musk’s tweet about plans to take Tesla private, required Tesla to establish more controls and form a new committee of independent board members to oversee Musk’s communications. But according to court documents, Denholm said Musk “does self-regulate” compliance, and some directors said they don’t review his tweets.

Tesla disclosed in 2022 that it had received a subpoena from the SEC seeking information about how the company was complying with the settlement.

Musk’s freewheeling commentary on Twitter, now X, and in interviews has injected volatility into Tesla’s share price and affected his other companies. In 2020, Tesla’s stock closed down more than 7% for the day after Musk tweeted, “Tesla stock price is too high imo.” Last year, major companies stopped advertising on X after he described an antisemitic post on X as “the actual truth.”

Investors have for decades pressed for independent directors, especially at public companies, because it allows them to push back against management and closely monitor what is happening inside the business.

The sweeping set of rules known as Sarbanes-Oxley in 2002 mandated that public companies have independent directors, including on the audit committee. The rules came after the collapse of energy trading giant Enron, which later was found to have hidden its financials amid improper board oversight.

Stock exchanges generally spell out how they define independence on boards and other expectations. At private companies, there are no requirements for the number of independent directors, or what constitutes one. At Nasdaq, if a company doesn’t comply with its majority independent board rule, it gives the company one year or until its next shareholder meeting to make a change; if not, it may be delisted.

Questions about a public director’s independence have gone to the courts, with judges sometimes finding problems with deep financial ties.

The Delaware Supreme Court in 2016 ruled that the majority of video game developer Zynga’s board weren’t independent. Among the reasons was that a venture-capital firm two directors worked for had invested in a startup the CEO’s wife co-founded and that another director and her husband co-owned a private plane with the CEO.

Following the court’s decision, Zynga expanded its board and formed a special litigation committee to investigate insider trading allegations. Zynga settled the suit in 2019 for $11 million.

“To me, it’s really: Are you capable of making a disinterested, objective decision uninfluenced by the relationship?” said Lawrence Hamermesh, former director of the Widener Institute of Delaware Corporate and Business Law, who has also served as senior special counsel in the SEC’s corporate finance division.

Surrounded by friends

When Tesla was looking to replace a departing director, it turned to a familiar face in JB Straubel. The board believed the company’s former chief technology officer, whom Tesla considers a co-founder, was someone Musk would listen to, could fill Ellison’s shoes and had technical expertise, according to people with knowledge of the board’s thinking.

Last year, ahead of a vote to approve Straubel, some shareholders pushed back over his close ties to the company, saying if he were added to the board then at least five of the eight members would lack independence. Straubel was elected anyway. A Nasdaq spokesman said it doesn’t comment on specific companies and referred a Journal question on how Straubel can be classified as an independent director to Tesla.

Musk has long surrounded himself with close friends as he built his business empire. He has turned to them for advice on new business ventures and on daily operational help.

In addition to Musk on the Tesla board, his brother, Kimbal Musk, is a member. He previously served on the SpaceX board and has counseled Musk on numerous ventures, including whether to start OpenAI and Neuralink. He and Musk are also close personally, often attending the same events and parties.

Ehrenpreis, who chairs two of four committees on the Tesla board, is designated independent by the company and has been close to Musk for years.

The venture capitalist held the right to buy the first Tesla Model 3—which some covet for bragging rights. Around Musk’s 46th birthday in 2017, he gave it to Musk, tweeting, “Much love and respect for everything you do.”

Ehrenpreis has personally or through his venture-capital firm, DBL Partners, invested in many of Musk’s ventures, totalling about $70 million.

On the Tesla board, he has made more than $220 million on stock sales earned through board service and has additional options worth more than $200 million at recent prices.

James Murdoch, former chief executive of 21st Century Fox, also is classified independent by Tesla. His friendship with Musk dates back to around 2006, and he has vacationed with Musk and their families, including on trips to Israel and Mexico.

In court testimony in 2022, Musk said he didn’t know Murdoch well, though Murdoch in an earlier deposition affirmed his friendship with Musk.

Murdoch, who is the younger son of Rupert Murdoch, chairman emeritus of News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal, has said in court testimony he considers himself independent and has described a director as “having an ability to exercise independence of thought in governance and oversight as a member of a public company.”

Murdoch poured $20 million into SpaceX, and a company controlled by him invested about $50 million in the space company, court records show.

Denholm, who is designated independent, is based in Australia and doesn’t socialise with Musk. She has said in court testimony she doesn’t have personal investments in Musk’s other companies.

Her decade-long position on the Tesla board has been lucrative, earning her more than $625 million in the company’s equity. Denholm has exercised about half her options, profiting more than $280 million from the sales.

Denholm runs Tesla board meetings as informal, family-style occasions. Directors sometimes ask softball questions of Musk, such as future Tesla product colours, according to people familiar with the board.

Musk, meanwhile, would sometimes arrive two hours late, or hours early, and then blame his staff for not getting him there at the appropriate time, according to one of the people.

Musk said he handpicked Denholm, who replaced him as board chair in 2018 under an agreement with the SEC, according to an interview on “60 Minutes” that year.

The idea Denholm would watch over him was “not realistic” given his status as the company’s largest shareholder, he said in the interview, adding: “I can just call for a shareholder vote and get anything done that I want.” Musk later tweeted that the show had edited the interview in a misleading way. A “60 Minutes” spokeswoman said the show stands by its reporting.

Gebbia, the Airbnb co-founder and friend of Musk’s, joined the Tesla board in 2022, lives in Texas and is designated an independent director.

Former Walgreens Boots Alliance executive Kathleen Wilson-Thompson, who joined the board in 2018, is designated independent and doesn’t have public ties to Musk.

Deal with ex-girlfriend

Three current and former Tesla and SpaceX board members have been among Musk’s closest personal and financial partners.

Ellison, the co-founder and current chief technology officer of Oracle, was designated independent during his board tenure at Tesla between 2018 and 2022. He has said “I’m very close friends” with Musk and has hosted him multiple times at his Hawaiian island, Lanai.

When Musk revealed his plans to buy Twitter, Ellison committed $1 billion in 2022, while still on the Tesla board, to help fund it, surpassing the investments of many of the venture-capital firms involved in the deal.

Gracias, whom Tesla classified as the company’s lead independent director from 2010 until 2019, has been close friends with Musk for more than two decades. Musk turned to Gracias for support after his baby son died in the early 2000s, according to a 2021 court deposition.

He is also one of the friends who attends private parties around the world and sometimes consumes illegal drugs with Musk.

In court testimony in 2022, he called Musk “extraordinary,” “an amazing engineer” and “a product genius.”

For his work on the Tesla board, he has made more than $100 million by selling shares he earned.

When Musk needed cash, Gracias lent him $1 million, Gracias said in a court deposition, though it is unclear when he gave the money or what it was for. Musk has also personally invested about $10 million in Gracias’s Valor Equity Partners.

When asked in a court deposition whether his close friendship and business relationships with Musk affected his ability to act as an independent director at Tesla, particularly related to Musk’s 2018 pay package, Gracias said it didn’t. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t have done it,” he said.

Gracias stepped down from the Tesla board after more than a decade in 2021 in response to the pressure to improve its corporate governance. He remains a SpaceX director.

Jurvetson is one of Musk’s closest friends, and the two have mixed friendship and business for years. Jurveston was an early investor in SpaceX, and the two have used LSD and ecstasy together.

Jurvetson, who is an amateur rocket enthusiast, often hosts Elon and Kimbal Musk for parties at his house at Half Moon Bay, a small beachside city south of San Francisco.

One episode, soon after the 2017 scandal that led to Musk and Jurvetson working to keep his Tesla board seat, shows the extreme intertwining of personal and business relationships around Musk.

Tesla’s general counsel at the time, Todd Maron—who had been a divorce lawyer for Musk—helped negotiate an understanding with one of Jurvetson’s ex-girlfriends, Keri Kukral, according to emails between the company and Kukral reviewed by the Journal.

As part of the 2018 arrangement, Kukral was given permission by Maron to review and approve public messaging, such as press releases, related to Jurvetson and his Tesla board seat, the emails show. After Maron left Tesla, his successor general counsel, Jonathan Chang, continued to communicate with her, the emails show.

In return, Kukral wrote a professional recommendation of Jurvetson to Tesla as he campaigned to keep his board seat.

It is highly unusual for a company’s general counsel to get involved in such personal matters of board members, or to give an outside person the power to review company messaging, corporate governance experts said.

Musk also tried to persuade board members to let Jurvetson vote while he was on a leave of absence, people familiar with the conversations said. Kimbal Musk, Murdoch and Denholm pushed back, the people said.

Jurvetson made more than $9 million selling Tesla shares received as a director before leaving the board in 2020, according to the documents reviewed by the Journal.

At least two former board members have bristled at the company’s lack of corporate governance and deference to Musk.

Former Tesla board member Linda Johnson Rice wasn’t close with Musk or other directors outside of work, although she sometimes saw fellow director Gracias at work events in Chicago, where they are both based.

She didn’t stand for re-election to the board in 2019 after serving less than two years over frustration with Musk’s volatile behaviour, including his drug use, the Journal reported. She informally asked whether the board should investigate and was brushed off.

“She served her term and that was it,” Musk tweeted about Rice, following the Journal’s January article about his drug use. “No negativity at all with Linda!”

Similarly, Hiromichi Mizuno, a former chief investment officer of Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund, left the Tesla board in 2023 after three years in part because of the lack of ability he felt he had to work on improving the company’s governance-related practices. At issue was the board’s deference to Musk, who had different priorities for Tesla, according to people familiar with the board.

Mizuno found the board to operate more like a family company with fiefdoms, rather than a public company with stringent rules and regulations, even if it did usually perform well. He has made a practice of avoiding close relationships with others in the workplace to remain objective. While Mizuno was sometimes invited for a drink with Musk, he never attended his private parties or events, according to the people.

Musk has been recently pushing for even greater control over Tesla. He currently owns around 13% of the company.

In mid-January, before the Delaware court ruling on his pay package, he wrote in a post on X that he was uncomfortable transforming the electric vehicle giant into a leader in artificial intelligence and robotics without voting control over roughly 25% of the company.

“Unless that is the case, I would prefer to build products outside of Tesla,” Musk wrote.

The tweet was effectively an ultimatum for Tesla board members to revisit his compensation. The board so far hasn’t acted.

—Berber Jin, Lisa Schwartz and Jim Oberman contributed to this article.

A few years ago, Indonesia set out to turn its treasure trove of nickel into an electric-car manufacturing boom.

It imposed a sweeping ban on the export of raw nickel. That meant that companies wanting to tap the world’s largest source of the mineral—used in the most powerful type of EV batteries—would have to build smelters in Indonesia. Officials bet that factories to make EV batteries and entire electric cars would also follow, spawning end-to-end supply chains close to the mineral bounty.

The smelters came, and Indonesia’s nickel industry witnessed explosive growth. But powering it is a coal binge that is throwing off the country’s climate goals. And Indonesians are still waiting for EV makers to lay down production lines.

As President Joko Widodo prepares to leave office this year after a decade—the most he can serve—he is exhorting his potential successors to stick with the policy that is at the centre of his economic legacy. Indonesia holds presidential elections on Feb. 14, and a new leader will take charge in October.

Widodo has cast his plan, referred to in economist-speak as downstreaming, as the answer to the question of how Indonesia will become a rich nation. He says the country is reversing a 400-year pattern dating back to colonial times of being exploited for its natural resources and getting little in return. He has prodded other developing nations to follow its lead.

Last year, officials escorted delegations from mineral-rich Papua New Guinea and the Democratic Republic of Congo to one of Indonesia’s largest nickel industrial parks to show them the scale of Indonesia’s achievements. New Chinese-built smelters dot the archipelago. The value of Indonesia’s nickel exports is up four times since 2019 to around $33 billion.

Not everyone believes the silver metal is a silver bullet.

Nickel smelters have led to a surge in coal use, with new coal plants coming up at a time when the world is trying to phase out the fossil fuel. A January report by Climate Rights International, a U.S. environmental group, said that a single nickel-focused industrial park located on eastern Indonesia’s Maluku islands will burn more coal than Spain or Brazil when it is fully operational.

“We are sacrificing the environment and society, while at the same time getting limited profits for the country,” Muhaimin Iskandar, a vice-presidential candidate in the coming election, said during a televised debate with his political opponents.

Other candidates have pledged to carry forward the president’s nickel policies, including the front-runner for president, Prabowo Subianto, who has said it is much better to export electric-vehicle batteries than raw nickel.

The “dirty nickel” reputation is threatening the very economic opportunities Indonesia covets. In October, nine U.S. senators signed a letter opposing a proposed free-trade agreement to source critical minerals from Indonesia, citing environmental and safety concerns. Without a free-trade deal, EV batteries with substantial quantities of Indonesia-processed nickel won’t be eligible for a major U.S. tax credit.

That makes the country’s nickel less attractive to Western EV makers, who are already battling questions from green groups about the environmental fallout of the country’s sprawling nickel operations.

In a sign of the growing unease, a deputy director for batteries and critical materials at the U.S. Energy Department, Ashley Zumwalt-Forbes, voiced concern in a LinkedIn post last month about what she called the grip of dirty Indonesian nickel on the market. Indonesia accounts for half the global nickel supply, up from a quarter in 2018.

The problems with nickel are also pushing EV makers to rework car batteries and go nickel-free. A lithium-iron-phosphate alternative is gaining traction, though it remains less powerful than batteries containing nickel.

Then there is the question of whether the policy is taking Indonesia toward Widodo’s goal of downstreaming—that is, a shift to higher-value manufacturing. Widodo has long said the endgame isn’t localising nickel processing but rather attracting EV and battery factories. Anything less, he says, could put Indonesia on the same track as some commodity-rich Latin American economies that have languished.

But so far, EV makers haven’t rushed into Indonesia. Tesla, which Widodo has assiduously courted, including on a 2022 trip to Texas to meet with founder Elon Musk, hasn’t shown any signs it plans to set up a factory in the country. No other Western automakers have built EV factories either, though General Motors has a stake in one China-based automaker producing electric cars in Indonesia. Some, like Ford, have made deals to tie up nickel supply.

Korean automaker Hyundai has since 2021 operated one of Indonesia’s only EV factories, focused on the domestic market. The unit can produce 150,000 vehicles a year, but made fewer than 9,500 in 2022 and 2023. Hyundai and Korea’s LG expect to begin producing battery cells at a plant in West Java this year.

Automakers generally look to set up battery and EV plants in the markets where people are already buying electric cars. That puts Indonesia, where few consumers have switched from combustion-engine vehicles, at a disadvantage. The country has a limited charging network and gasoline is heavily subsidised.

Indonesian policymakers who believe the country’s nickel bounty gives it leverage over carmakers are mistaken, said Tom Lembong, a former trade minister under Widodo. He pointed to the growth of nickel-free batteries as a warning against betting big on nickel.

Lembong, who is advising presidential candidate Anies Baswedan—whose ticket advocates focusing on promoting labor-intensive industries—said Indonesia has made limited progress moving up the value chain.

“The irony about this is they call it downstreaming, but we’re still very upstream,” he said.

Septian Hario Seto, a senior Indonesian official involved in nickel policymaking, acknowledged that EV battery and car factories have been slower to come than nickel smelters. The government has brought new regulations to address that, he said, such as one that makes it easier for EV makers to import cars into Indonesia on the condition they later build a factory.

Last month, Chinese EV giant BYD said it would begin car sales in Indonesia, and break ground on a manufacturing unit later this year.

Overall, Seto said the nickel policy has been successful, boosting economic growth in less-developed eastern regions where the nickel is found, and providing jobs and tax revenue. The government has taken steps to limit environmental degradation, such as by banning companies from jettisoning mining waste into the ocean, and will try to bring hydropower projects online as an alternative to coal, he said.

Cullen Hendrix, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C., said there are two ways to assess Indonesia’s industrial policy.

“It’s been successful at driving foreign investment and building nickel processing capacity,” he said. “So far it hasn’t achieved the fully integrated mine-to-EV battery assembly to which it aspires.”