How do you motivate the richest person in the world?
New York Times. Extracts:
Much like an earlier pay plan that Tesla shareholders approved in 2018, this 12-step package asks Musk … to vastly expand Tesla’s stock market valuation — to $8.5 trillion from around $1.4 trillion — while hitting a variety of other goals. Those include selling one million robots with humanlike qualities and 10 million paid subscriptions to the company’s self-driving software.
Tesla’s directors and some investors, including the board that oversees Florida’s public pension fund, hailed the $1 trillion pay plan as a way to motivate Musk, who is already the world’s wealthiest person, to build futuristic products like cars that can drive themselves.
The plan is structured in such a way that if Musk makes money, the company’s investors do, too.
Musk also probably had the support of many smaller investors who retained their stock despite slumping profits and car sales - and as Musk’s foray into politics in the last year, in support of Trump, alienated many people.
“The people who have stayed as shareholders after all this are the people who have drunk the Elon Kool-Aid,” said Randall Peterson, a professor of organizational behavior at the London Business School.
Most large investment funds did not indicate how they planned to vote. Vanguard, the largest shareholder in Tesla after Mr. Musk, did not respond to requests for comment. BlackRock and State Street Advisors, the third- and fourth-largest shareholders, declined to comment ahead of the vote.
But another of the company’s biggest investors, the manager of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, Norges Bank Investment Management, said it would vote against the pay package. “While we appreciate the significant value created under Mr. Musk’s visionary role, we are concerned about the total size of the award, dilution and lack of mitigation of key person risk,” the firm said, using a business term for a company’s dependence on one particular person.
www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/business/elon-musk-tesla-pay-vote.html
