Tesla shareholders approved a pay package on Thursday that could make CEO Elon Musk, already the world’s richest person, the world’s first trillionaire.
Tesla announced that more than 75% of shares voted in favor of the pay package during the company’s annual shareholder meeting. The vote didn’t include the 15% of the company that Musk already owns.
The crowd at the meeting broke into cheers and chants when the results were announced. Musk thanked the shareholders and the Tesla board soon after. “I super appreciate it,” he said.
Musk doesn’t take any salary, but the approved pay package comes in the form of a stock grant that would give him as much as 423.7 million additional Tesla shares over the next 10 years.
Those shares could be worth about $1 trillion, assuming the company reaches the $8.5 trillion market cap needed to have Musk qualify for the full potential payout. In addition, Tesla needs to achieve a series of either operational or financial targets for him to get the full number of shares, which would be distributed in 12 equal blocks.
Getting all the shares available under this package over the next 10 years would be the equivalent of earning $275 million a day, dwarfing any other executive pay package in history.
For Tesla to reach the $8.5 trillion in market value needed, shares need to jump 466% from today’s stock price. That’s also about 70% higher than the world’s most valuable company, Nvidia, which hit a record $5 trillion market cap last week.
Musk is already worth an estimated $473 billion according to Bloomberg’s billionaire tracker, most due to his holdings in Tesla, as well as the other companies he controls, including SpaceX and xAI.
A vote to reject the pay package Thursday could have meant his exit from Tesla’s CEO office. Tesla’s board said in a filing that Musk had raised the possibility of leaving the company if he didn’t get the assurances of control that the pay package could grant him.
However, the company has had a rocky year. Sales and profits plunged in the first half and Tesla faces potential billions in lost revenue due to reduced US government support for electric vehicles.
A future bet on robots and AI
But Musk and Tesla executives dismiss those problems, saying Tesla is shifting focus from merely selling EVs to selling self-driving cars, including a fleet of “robotaxis,” as well as humanoid robots.
In his remarks to shareholders, Musk spoke more about robots, which have yet to go on sale, than he did about the company’s cars. Most of his references to cars were about its so-called full self-driving (FSD), a driver assistance feature that still requires drivers to stay alert and ready to take control of the cars.
But Musk said the robots will be bigger than the company’s car business – or any other business, even.
“I think it’s going to be the biggest product of all time by far,” he said. “So like bigger than cell phones, bigger than anything. I guess a way to think about it is that every human on Earth is going to want to have their own personal R2D2 or C3PO.”
He even predicted Tesla’s robots could replace surgeons, lead to the end of global poverty and re-shape the global economic order. He claims they could be produced for $20,000 each, allowing the company to sell them for about the price of a car.
Still, those products and concepts are still under development and haven’t gone on sale. That means even with the passage of the pay package, it’s not certain that Musk will ever see any of its potential hundreds of millions of shares. He will need to straighten out the company’s current problems and then live up to the big promises that he’s made for the future.
Musk has insisted he needs the additional shares to have more control over the company, not because he wants so much more wealth.
“It’s not like I’m going to go spend the money,” Musk said on a call with investors last month. “There needs to be enough voting control to give (me) a strong influence – but not so much that I can’t be fired if I go insane.”
This story has been updated with additional reporting and context.
