• Dutch pension fund ABP sold its Tesla stake over Musk's pay and working conditions at the company.
• ABP disagreed with Musk's compensation package and voted against it in June.
• The fund called the pay package "controversial and exceptionally high."

A Dutch civil service pension fund sold its entire stake in Tesla over disapproval of CEO Elon Musk's pay package and working conditions at the company.

Stichting Pensioenfonds ABP, one of Europe's largest pension funds, sold 2.8 million shares in the electric vehicle maker in September because it disagreed with Musk's pay package, Dutch outlet Het Financieele Dagblad reported Friday. The report did not detail the fund's specific concerns about labor conditions at the company.

A spokesperson for ABP, which manages $552 billion overall, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Bloomberg reported that ABP's Tesla stake was valued at about $585 million.

In a statement to the NL Times, ABP said "we cannot and do not need to invest in everything," and that the divestment was not politically motivated. Musk has been a prominent supporter of President-elect Donald Trump, and is co-leading a commission called the Department of Government Efficiency.

In 2018, Tesla's board and shareholders voted in favor of a performance-based compensation plan. The same year, a shareholder sued Tesla and Musk, arguing that Musk influenced the board's decision through his personal relationships with board members, including his brother. In January 2024, a Delaware judge ruled to strike down Musk's compensation package, siding with a shareholder. The stock option-based package could be worth tens of billions of dollars.

In June, the EV maker held a second vote, which led to shareholder approval of Musk's pay. ABP voted against the pay package and called it "controversial and exceptionally high."

Last month, the judge, Chancellor Kathaleen St. J. McCormick, once again ruled against the compensation package, saying that Tesla's June shareholder vote wasn't enough to pass the package.

Tesla's Model Y was the best-selling car in the Netherlands in 2024, but the carmaker's sales have been declining in Europe. New Tesla car registrations from January to November 2024 fell over 15% compared to the same period in 2023, according to European Automobile Manufacturers Association data.

Tesla is worth about $1.27 trillion and its stock has risen about 74% in the past year.

The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A historic Black community that grew out of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s is among the communities wiped away by devastating wildfires charring through Los Angeles County.

The big picture: The Eaton Fire has all but flatted the many Black-owned homes and businesses in the unincorporated area of Altadena, California, in San Gabriel Valley and the Verdugos regions.

Zoom in: The community of 42,000 residents — 18% are Black — has been among the hardest hit by wildfires that so far have claimed 24 lives and burned away over 12,000 structures across the county.

• The Eaton Fire alone charred more than 1,000 structures and killed at least five people in Altadena, per the Los Angeles Times.

Octavia E. Butler, the late-pioneering Black science fiction novelist who wrote about a wildfire from climate change starting on February 1, 2025, in her novel "Parable of the Sower," is buried in an Altadena cemetery.

• The cemetery caught fire, the LA Times reports.

Zoom out: Satellite images of burning buildings in Altadena examined by Axios show that last week, a large portion of the community was in flames or burned to ash.

• The images give clues to how quickly the fire moved to long-protected communities because of high winds and drought conditions.
• The whole community was ordered to evacuate when the Eaton Fire began last week and has since claimed many of the community's churches, landmarks and much of its downtown.

State of play: Much attention on the wildfires has focused on the destruction of homes in wealthy areas and of celebrities, but Altadena's devastation shows how middle-class areas and communities of color were also hit.

• In the days after the Eaton Fire started, Black residents returned to homes passed down by family members only to see them gone as the fire burned block.
• The community, where 58% of residents are people of color, also saw many Latino and Asian American residents return to rubble.

Among those returning to ash in Altadena was Shawn Brown, a Black homeowner. She told The Associated Press she lost her home and a charter school she founded.

• She had a message for fellow Black homeowners in the wake of despair: "I would tell them to stand strong, rebuild, continue the generational progress of African-Americans."

Flashback: In 1960, 95% of Altadena's residents were white, according to Altadena Heritage, a nonprofit organization that seeks to preserve the community's history.

• After President Lyndon Johnson signed several civil rights bills, including The Fair Housing Act of 1968, Altadena's Black population grew from 4% in 1960 to 27% in 1970.
• Altadena was one of the few communities offering housing and loans to Black Americans during the Civil Rights Movement. As a result, it became a popular community for a growing Black middle class seeking to escape discrimination elsewhere.

Stunning stat: Before the fire, the Black homeownership rate stood at 81.5% — nearly the national rate for Black homeowners, per the AP.

What we're watching: Recovering and rebuilding efforts typically overlook communities of color, who struggle amid the maze of insurance bureaucracies and federal disaster relief programs.

• Communities like Altadena near wildfire-prone areas may consider building fire-prevention walls or barriers, as Octavia E. Butler foresaw in her futuristic novels.

More from Axios:

• Climate change plays key contributing role in L.A. fires
• L.A. fires could be the U.S.' worst natural disaster, Newsom says
• L.A. County fires already among most destructive ever recorded in California

In the age of social media-driven, viral trends, brands often look to platforms like TikTok to strike gold with the algorithm and reach a massive audience. As social media fragmentation continues and the TikTok ban looms even nearer, the concept of virality may soon shift, making it an even less realistic goal than before. 

Take Bogg Bag, the brightly colored, Croc-inspired tote bag that became one of the many “TikTok Made Me Buy It” products backed by influencers and content creators, setting it on the path to achieve $100 million in revenue last year, according to Bogg Bag founder and CEO Kim Vaccarella.

Last year, the bags were everywhere on social media. One video was posted back in May where a mom packing a Bogg Bag with daily essentials got 1.7 million likes. The post was in partnership with Bloom Nutrition, health supplement company, but mentioned Bogg in the caption. Another post featuring a healthcare worker sporting a Bogg Bag racked up more than 378,000 likes in January. In June, another nurse who accessorized the bag in an unsponsored post got nearly 98,000 likes.

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Throughout 2024, several major brands announced they were creating their own brand studios that would soon roll out television shows and films. Marketers, it seems, have become more interested in creating entertainment rather than just advertising around it.

In February, luxury behemoth LVMH announced the creation of 22 Montaigne Entertainment in partnership with Superconnector Studios. In June, Starbucks touted its own burgeoning studio, Starbucks Studios, with the help of Sugar23. And in August, Chick-Fil-A revealed its plan for its own original programming focusing on reality TV. That’s just to name a few of the major brands that have been dipping more than a toe into entertainment to create their own studios.

Studios aren’t the only way brands are getting more involved in entertainment production either. In December, Sugar23 and production and distribution company Fifth Season kicked-off a three year venture to work with advertisers to co-finance $100 million of productions. That’s another one of the ways entertainment production companies are working with marketers. It all lays the groundwork for marketers to move beyond mostly creating advertising that interrupts programming people want to watch to (potentially) create that very entertainment.

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This edition of Digiday’s daily CES Briefing looks at the need for brands to adopt SEO strategies for dealing with AI agents, an interview with Mastercard’s Raja Rajamannar about agency compensation models in the AI era and how Dotdash Meredith has used OpenAI to boost its contextual ad product D/Cipher.

SEO for the agentic AI era

Expect to hear a lot about search engine optimization in 2025. Except it won’t be called that.

“It’s no longer about search engine optimization. It’s about answer engines,” said Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi.

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Advertisers may still be standing by TikTok for now, but its execs are eyeing the door as the app’s U.S. future grows increasingly precarious. 

Since the start of the year, two senior leaders from its ad team have already made their exit. Sameer Singh, general manager for global business solutions in North America, is reportedly leaving the platform, after three-and-a-half years of service. It’s understood he is available to support the transition for his team until the end of February. Days later, it was reported that Jack Bamberger, general manager of agency business for the region, had already left on Jan. 3, having only worked at TikTok since March 2024. 

While they have not said publicly why they departed, the timing is hard to ignore — coming just days before the Supreme Court weighed in on a pivotal case that could determine the platform’s fate in the U.S. last week (Jan. 10). Neither Singh nor Bamberger responded to Digiday’s request for comment.

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Shoppable TV ads powered by AI-powered visual search aren’t yet a household habit. However, one startup’s new partnerships with two major TV manufacturers are just one of the many ways AI was showcased in Las Vegas last week during CES 2025.

‘Searchable TV’?

At CES 2025 last week, a startup called TheTake announced new deals with LG and Samsung, bringing its total footprint to more than 30 million devices. Founded a decade ago, TheTake uses visual AI to let users click on items within a show to see what it is, where to buy them, and view similar items. The on-screen display also shows both organic recommendations and ads from brands and retailers.

The goal is to take a “pull more than push” approach to product discovery and the ads around them, said TheTake founder and CEO Tyler Cooper. With LG, the expanded partnership includes a new “click to search” feature to identify the products, places, and people on-screen. With Samsung, the startup debuted a new way to browse and shop for products within content, along with updates for advertisers to reach high-intent audiences.

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Once the U.S. presidential election was decided on Nov. 5, 2024, with former president Donald Trump defeating vice president Kamala Harris — an election that was certified only a week ago without attempts to overthrow the government, thankfully — there was little doubt the country’s mindset would shift somewhat rightward. 

That shift took a decisive and intentional lurch rightward last week with Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg announcing he was dismantling the company’s fact-checking apparatus in favor of X’s approach to content moderation — community notes. The move, because it aligns with X owner Elon Musk, was largely interpreted as a means of currying favor with the incoming administration — which, it’s fair to say, Musk helped usher into power more than any single person or entity in the last year. Whether that’s true or not remains in the eye of the beholder.

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• DOGE plans to deploy its staffers to major government agencies after Donald Trump takes office.
• Two DOGE representatives will be embedded at each agency, The New York Times reported.
• The commission has been hiring since it was announced in November.

Elon Musk's government efficiency commission is looking to embed staffers at government agencies to lead cost cutting efforts.

Most major government agencies will be given two representatives from the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, after President-elect Donald Trump takes office on January 20, The New York Times reported on Sunday, citing about a dozen people who are familiar with DOGE's operations.

Those who aren't deployed will instead be stationed at the US Digital Service, a branch of the White House that provides IT consulting services to federal agencies, the outlet reported.

Then-President Barack Obama described the USDS as a "startup at the White House" when he created the agency in 2014.

The Times added that DOGE could also have an office at the White House's Office of Management and Budget. The OMB prepares the president's budget request for Congress.

Musk did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

In November, Trump announced that DOGE would be co-led by Musk and biotech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy. The commission, Trump said in his announcement, is set to conclude its work by July 4, 2026.

DOGE kicked off its recruitment efforts in the same month. The commission started an account on Musk's social network X and asked applicants to send in their CVs via direct message.

Thus far, the commission said it has been hiring for software engineering, information security engineering, HR, IT, and finance roles.

Back in October, Musk said that DOGE would help the government to save at least $2 trillion, though he didn't specify where the savings would come from. The federal government spent $6.75 trillion in the 2024 fiscal year.

Last week, Musk said that saving $2 trillion would be "the best-case outcome" for DOGE, adding that his commission had a "good shot" at saving $1 trillion.

"If we can drop the budget deficit from $2 trillion to $1 trillion and free up the economy to have additional growth such that the output of goods and services keeps pace with the increase in the money supply, then there will be no inflation. So that, I think, would be an epic outcome," Musk told Mark Penn, the chairman and CEO of marketing company Stagwell, in an interview on January 8.