Elon Musk has done it again: danced his way through controversy and out the other side with a shareholder-approved payday so big it almost breaks capitalism’s imagination.
The Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) boss has just won backing for a record-breaking compensation package that could, on paper, be worth nearly $1 trillion. That’s trillion, with a “t”.
The vote at Tesla’s annual general meeting in Austin wasn’t exactly a nail-biter: roughly 75% of shareholders said yes. Cue applause, whoops, and Musk shimmying on stage to chants of his name, flanked by his humanoid robots.
“Other shareholder meetings are snoozefests but ours are bangers,” he declared. In the theatre of Musk, it’s always showtime.
The new pay deal, the biggest in corporate history, ties Musk’s rewards to a set of monumental goals.
To claim the full package, he must lift Tesla’s market value from around $1.4 trillion today to $8.5 trillion and hit milestones like putting a million self-driving “robotaxis” on the road. Achieve all that and he pockets hundreds of millions of new shares.
Critics, though, see the plan as both excessive and emblematic of Tesla’s strange governance orbit, where Musk’s gravitational pull bends corporate norms.
Norway’s $1.6 trillion sovereign wealth fund voted against it, as did CalPERS, America’s largest public pension fund. Their objections weren’t about Musk’s ambition; they were about power.
Tesla’s board, stacked with allies and family members, has been accused of rubber-stamping his demands.
This isn’t the first time the pay plan’s legality has been questioned. A Delaware court struck down a previous iteration earlier this year, ruling that Tesla’s directors were too close to Musk to make an independent decision.
The company has since reincorporated in Texas, a state with a friendlier regulatory climate, while the Delaware Supreme Court reviews that decision.
Musk’s defenders say the package isn’t a reward for past glories but a motivator for future miracles.
Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives, one of Wall Street’s most loyal Musk-watchers, called him “Tesla’s biggest asset”.
"[With] Musk, as its leader for the foreseeable future, we continue to believe that the AI valuation is getting unlocked, and we believe the march to an AI-driven valuation for TSLA over the next six to nine months has now begun," he added.
But Tesla’s challenges are stacking up faster than its share price. Electric vehicle sales have slowed, competition from China is fierce, and the much-hyped “Full Self-Driving” software remains under regulatory scrutiny after a series of accidents.
Meanwhile, Musk seems more interested in talking up the Optimus robot than fixing the faltering car business.
As Gene Munster of Deepwater Asset Management dryly noted, “Let it sink in where Musk’s head is at.” The new chapter, it seems, begins not with cars, but with robots.
For now, the faithful have spoken. Musk gets his shot at the trillion-dollar dream, and Tesla gets to keep its showman-in-chief. But behind the fireworks, a deeper tension lingers: can one man’s vision, however grand, still drive a company built to save the world from itself?