I believe in honouring deals, even if it’s unsavoury ex post facto. Until recently, that meant approving the pay package.
But Musk unilaterally amended the deal when he “threatened on X…to develop AI elsewhere if he doesn’t get a 25% stake in Tesla” [1]. Then he developed AI elsewhere [2]. If you promise to give me a dollar, you dither, I say I’ll burn your house down if you don’t, and then I burn your house down, I don’t believe you owe me the dollar anymore.
Musk should offer to return xAI’s funding and merge it into Tesla in exchange for the vote.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/tesla-elon-musk-pay-package-share...
Another way to think about this is that investors are in a position where they got that wildly ambitious growth, and are currently not obligated to pay for it, so why would they? This is to the guy that has no problems breaking contracts of his own, and gives the finger to people he owes money to.
I guess we'll see when this comes to a vote, but it would be shrewd business not to.
This situation, though, has a different set of forward-looking concerns. Musk already has several other jobs. And the primary concern is that he wants this large pay package so that he can have more personal resources to put toward those other jobs (at the expense of Tesla).
As it stands now, Musk’s personal financial position depends on leverage against his Tesla position. This binds him to Tesla’s future performance. Giving him a huge personal pay package essentially weakens that binding, giving him greater license to deprioritize his Tesla leadership in favor of SpaceX, Xai, Neuralink, etc.
There is an argument to be made that Tesla’s board should be essentially antagonistic toward Musk’s other companies, given that his time and attention are finite resources, and Tesla is a public company. The board has responsibilities to investors to maximize their return, which should take precedence over whatever feelings of gratitude or connection they feel toward Musk personally.
If anyone took away a software engineers options here after a company became successful because the company later decided it's too much there'd be hell to pay. Everyone rightfully complained about Zynga doing this.
But here it's fine? Bullshit. I voted to pay the man his due. I voted to move the corp out of Delaware to Texas. He made me money under reasonable terms. Back then everyone said he'd just fail.
b) Stop devaluing the Tesla brand with his controversial, inflammatory comments.
c) Compensation package that is more reasonable compared with other companies.
The speculation on Tesla's stock raised the "market cap". Any stock that Tesla doesn't own brings Tesla exactly 0 dollars, no matter how hight the illusionary market cap there is.
How much of the stock does Tesla actually own? How much of the stock that Tesla owns can the company safely sell to offset the $45 billion of actual money that they had to cough up for Elon?
https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-announces-new-long-...
I hate to defend executive comp, but Tesla’s market cap has gone up by $487 billion (almost 10x) since he was awarded that comp package in 2018. Half of all EVs sold in the US are Teslas. In 2023, the Model Y was the world’s bestselling car, outselling the Toyota Corolla. That’s completely insane. What more do you want?