Or shareholder, when one controls all the levers.

Not quite. Tesla's mission is to do what its voting shareholders want. Usually, shareholders want to maximize their returns, but Tesla's shareholders voted to reduce their returns to overpay Musk for work already done.

Presumably because they believe keeping Musk will increase value long term, so they are still maximizing the value of the future cashflows discounted to the present.

The size of Musk's ownership stake adds another layer to this metric, but at the limit, that really that just means the words "they" in my previous statement can be replaced with "Elon Musk"

No, the reason most voters gave is that the payment was promised, not that it maximized their returns. There are any number of projects that Tesla could spend $50 billion on that would provide a greater return to investors than giving it to Musk. Even giving him a fraction of that would have been enough to retain Musk over giving him nothing, if they really believe Musk's leadership will be positive for future returns.

I suspect many Tesla shareholder believe they are investing in Musk, rather than just Tesla. That explains much of their behavior.

> The mission of Tesla is to maximize value to its shareholders

That is one philosophy:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_primacy

It is not the only one:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakeholder_theory

* https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v...

The shareholders literally own the company, so they are the ones who get to decide what gets maximized. Most shareholders decide they want returns to themselves to be maximized. Not all will in every single company at every point in time, but it's likely the case 99.9% of the time.

> The shareholders literally own the company […]

They do not actually.

* https://archive.ph/VCUp4 / https://www.ft.com/content/7bd1b20a-879b-11e5-90de-f44762bf9...

* https://www.pqmagazine.com/the-myth-of-shareholder-ownership...

* https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergeorgescu/2021/07/21/the-s...

* https://edwardslaw.ca/blog/shareholders-agreements-in-canada...

* https://www.ippr.org/articles/who-owns-a-company

* https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-instituti...

They have certain claims, but so do customers, suppliers, employees, governments (taxes), bond holders, etc. The claims of shareholders come last, which is why owning stock gets you higher returns (than, e.g., bonds from the company): you're at highest risk of losing money from being last on claims, so you should be rewarded for that higher risk.

Those are opinion pieces and meant to be contrarian. Shareholders by definition own the equity of the company. You're confounding the equity with the enterprise, while also ignoring the meaning of "control".

Having IOUs from the company in the form of future goods or services owed to customers, interest payments owed to debtholders or future taxes owed to the government do not equate to having an actual ownership in the business.