Tesla's board has proposed an unprecedented pay package for its CEO Elon Musk: around $1 trillion worth of shares, Bloomberg reports.
It's a major escalation in the firm's increasingly desperate attempts to encourage its highly divisive leader to stick around and stay attentive. That's despite Tesla's core business imploding over the past year, largely the result of Musk's alienating behavior and surging international competition.
"Simply put, retaining and incentivizing Elon is fundamental to Tesla achieving these goals and becoming the most valuable company in history," chair Robyn Denholm and director Kathleen Wilson-Thompson wrote in a shareholder letter.
However, that $1 trillion figure comes with some significant asterisks. Musk will have to work for the money, growing the flailing automotive company to a staggering market value of at least $8.5 trillion — almost eight times its current $1.1 trillion valuation today.
That's more than double the valuation of the world's most valuable company today, the AI chip maker Nvidia. It would also make Musk, currently the richest man in the world, the first trillionaire.
A full payout, still a decade away, would require Tesla to achieve some extraordinarily ambitious benchmarks. At the same time, as Bloomberg reports, the additional shares would raise Musk's personal stake to at least 25 percent, per the firm's filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Last year, Musk warned that he's "uncomfortable growing Tesla to be a leader in AI & robotics without having ~25 percent voting control," comments that amounted to "blackmail," according to some investors.
The latest offer comes after Musk's 2018 pay package, which was valued over $50 billion at the time, was struck down by Delaware judge Kathaleen McCormick in early 2024. In December of last year, the same judge struck down the pay package yet again after shareholders voted to reinstate it.
But last month, Tesla awarded its controversial CEO a whopping $29 billion worth of its shares, arguing that the "war for AI talent is intensifying" and that "Elon has not received meaningful compensation for eight years since the 2012 CEO Performance Award was last earned in 2017."
The latest $1 trillion offer once again highlights the sheer control Musk maintains over the company. That's despite an extremely turbulent year so far, with his stint at the helm of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency greatly angering Tesla customers and investors alike. The company's finances have been in free fall as car sales continue to slump across multiple quarters.
His promises to return to lead his businesses once more by leaving politics behind — while simultaneously vowing to create his own political party to oppose the GOP — have proved enough to keep Tesla's shares afloat, at least for now.
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