Elon Musk is the world’s richest person. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO is worth $430 billion, according to Forbes. But now, thanks to a new pay package proposed on Friday by Tesla’s board, he could eventually more than double his net worth, becoming the world’s first trillionaire.
The pay package would add roughly $900 billion to Musk’s bottom line by awarding him over 423 million new shares, but only if he manages to grow the company’s stock market value to $8.5 trillion (it’s worth around $1.1 trillion today). Should Musk earn the full award, he’d own roughly 25 percent of the company—or nearly double his current 13 percent share.
Growing Tesla’s value wouldn’t be Musk’s only requirement to earn the full amount. He’d have to deploy one million robotaxis, sell one million humanoid robots, sell 20 million more cars, grow full self-driving subscriptions to 10 million users, and increase operating profits to $400 billion (it was just $17 billion in 2024). Also, he’d have to stay at the company for at least seven and a half years to cash in any of the shares awarded, and 10 years to earn the full stack.
The package is, plainly put, the largest proposed for any CEO in the history of, well, CEOs. For some comparison, General Motors CEO Mary Barra made $29.5 million in 2024, while Ford CEO Jim Farley raked in “just” $24.9 million in the same period. Should Musk achieve the proposal’s lofty goals, these numbers would be proverbial drops in his bucket.
But honestly, I don’t see Tesla achieving a lot of these numbers in the timeframe projected here. The company’s stock price peaked in December 2024 before Musk took on a role in the federal government as head of the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, where he pushed for axing public funding through job cuts, among other sweeping edicts. Naturally, Musk spending his (seemingly very valuable) time working for the government rather than Tesla sent the stock price tumbling. Since that peak, it’s lost nearly 30 percent of its value.
Musk stepped away from DOGE in late May, but global sales of Tesla have continued to crash globally, with a 13-percent decline year-over-year—not just due to Musk’s actions, but to ever-increasing competition from cheaper, higher-quality Chinese EVs in overseas markets. But even in America, where Chinese EVs aren’t sold due to huge import taxes, Tesla has seen an identical 13-percent decline in sales.
CEO drama aside, Tesla’s lineup is also just really old. The Model S is one of the oldest cars on sale today, having first been launched in 2012. The Model X, meanwhile, has been around since 2017. And the Model Y isn’t much younger, first hitting streets in 2019. Sales of the only truly new car Tesla’s released in the past six years, the Cybertruck, have fallen off a cliff.
For Musk to see any of this new compensation package, he’d have to perform a miracle turnaround for the brand. Many believe Tesla’s stock is already overvalued (it’s worth more than three times as much as Toyota, despite Toyota outselling Tesla six-to-one). For him to get even 1/12th of this compensation, he’ll have to double the value of the company to around $2 trillion. If he wants the full compensation package, he’ll have to grow Tesla to be double the value of Nvidia, currently the most valuable company on the planet. It’s not a realistic goal, even in 10 years.
That’s not to say Musk won’t try. The South African-born CEO routinely overpromises and underdelivers on products, which still somehow results in big stock gains. He first promised self-driving tech for 2016, but only now, in 2025, are the first real self-driving cars from the brand rolling out in limited numbers. And who could forget about the second-generation Tesla Roadster? That car was first revealed in 2017, with plans to launch in 2020. We’re now five years past that deadline, with nary a prototype spotted on the road.
To Musk’s credit, he’s already off to a good start today. On the news of this announcement, Tesla’s stock price jumped 2 percent, according ot MarketWatch. Just 772 percent more to go.
Photo: DepositPhotos.com
What a world we live in where an actual Nazi is potentially (even if implausibly, improbably, and hopefully most likely impossibly) on track to become our first trillionaire.
It’s more than enough to make any decent person’s head explode. Thank goodness 99% of the people who fought the Nazis in WWII are no longer with us to see this. (According to this just less than 0.5% of the Americans who served during WWII are still alive as of 2025: https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/wwii-veteran-statistics)
I did think it was pretty odd that Tesla put in a clause that this contract is null and void if Elon ever leaves the Clippers roster.
If this doesn’t wake the masses up to the reality that we are in a new Gilded Age, I don’t know what will. Only thing that will stop these Robber Barons is when their head is firm attached to the sharp size of a pike. These people should be afraid to ask for that much money, but there will be just enough bootlickers who will find some way to defend this shit.
If I were a board member, I would vote to grant him a free submersible.
This is a joke. Tesla’s board is a joke. They want to reward him a TRILLION dollars to juice the stock price? Wow, seems like great incentive to you know, act responsible, be a good human, etc. Wait, he makes shit up and promises the moon and the never, ever delivers???
This is the equivalent of my boss telling me he’ll give me a trillion dollars if I cure cancer. It isn’t going to happen, so the numbers are like the points on Whose Line: they don’t matter.
If I were you, I’d start by asking to define “cure” and “cancer” then look for any loopholes. 🙂
They want him around for another 10 years? That’s an irresponsible board.
Isn’t this the guy who said working from home was immoral? And a Trillion dollar pay package is OK? What hellish reality are we living in?
This is just for the headlines and to keep drawing attention to them. Realistically no different than me promising everyone in this comments section a million bucks if I can get my personal worth to a billion. Even if I drew up a legal document saying that, it doesn’t suddenly make this the highest paid comment section on the internet if I have no realistic chance of doing it.
I hope it has a clause that says it is all null and void if he spends any time attempting to run Twitter, SpaceX, or any other new company/government entity/daydream/fantasy he cooks up. The whole issue is his lack of focus and unless they specifically disincentivize that he’s going to keep doing it.
Actually, the package specifically mentions they don’t care where/how he spends his time
Probably unspoken is that the LESS time he spends there, the better.
Ridiculous
People have a really tough time understanding the magnitude of millions v. billions v. trillions
They really do. It takes roughly 11 days to count to 1 million, to count to 1 billion would take 31 YEARS.
And then look at the percentages too. Elon donating 250 million to the Trump campaign is a smaller percentage of his net worth than the couple hundred bucks a year I donate to animal shelters is of mine.
And that percentage is even less relevant to him, yet it’s a fortune that many people could live well off of for the rest of their lives. It’s astounding and it’s obvious from all the billionaire apologists that people really have no understanding about what that magnitude of wealth really is. I think it’s really beyond them to conceive of how different a world that is.
It really aggravates me how clueless people are about this. Especially when someone like Bernie Sanders (or even Bill Burr over the past year) talk about income inequality in reference to the billionaires, and trolls always have to comment “You’re a millionaire too, when are you giving YOUR money away?”, like having a net worth of a few million is the same thing as being a multi-billionaire.
Then you have the goddamn PRESIDENT OF THE US increasing his net worth by 3.4 BILLION and counting since taking office, and those people are like eh, whatever hE’s GoOd aT bUsIneSs. .
Another portion of this misplaced admiration (besides sociopaths who do get the picture) is that there is so often morally, if not legally, reprehensible actions that led to their fortunes. As the saying goes: Behind every great fortune is a great crime. Exceptions to this would be quite rare, if considering moral crimes rather than only legal ones. After all, they buy the politicians who write the laws, so to count violations of law as sole counter balance against the weight of their hearts, would give the wrong picture of their soul’s true final destiny. These people are wendigos, filled with an emptiness that results in insatiable greed and a mind too stupid to see that avarice will never fill that void, not that they possess the strength to do anything about it.
I am reminded of the COTD from a few days ago: The difference between a million and a billion is roughly a billion.
Pop quiz: What does that make the difference between a billion and a trillion?
XD
“He first promised self-driving tech for 2016, but only now, in 2025, are the first real self-driving cars from the brand rolling out in limited numbers.”
No… they are not.
Jesus… does
NoelLeonElon need that much more money?He might need to buy an entire country in a couple years.
That last bit about the stock price seems odd. “We gave our weird
racistcontroversial CEO a potentially massive incentives-based contract, even though we’re pretty sure he is personally responsible for our current situation. Spend spend spend!” And Wall Street goes “Brilliant! Sign me up for the impossible contract!” Just odd.Can someone compare that timeline with where Tesla was when the 1st compensation package was offered (the now controversial Delaware ruling that caused a few companies to leave the state)?
I read elsewhere that a trillion dollars is double all the revenue that Tesla has ever made and 40x the all-time profit.
Tesla can’t be a real company at this point, right?
It’s a
meme stockreligion.Listen, just because 4/5 of these requirements don’t functional exist won’t stop this dreamer! Sure, turning America into Will Smith vehicle “I, Robot” before George R.R. Martin finishes The Winds of Winter won’t be easy. But, Tony Stark IRL is focused. He definitely understands us, fellow humans. And he isn’t easily distracted by various memes of questionable origin and/or substances. When he’s retweeting “Concerning” to memes, he’s actually studying the human condition. Which he will then upload into a super basketball robot to replace Lebron when he retires in 2032!
you spelled Justin Hammer wrong
I modified the quote to accurately portray my thoughts.
Just here for the comments on this one.
He’s going full Dr. Evil on this one
Honestly if you want to see people melting down the BMW iX3 article is probably a better bet this AM
It’s the Final Meltdown of the week!
That is fantastic!
That one at least is in response to something new and interesting, not the same people talking to each other about the same tired Elon topics that have been beaten not just to death, but into the afterlife as well.
I’m biased since I’m a BMW fan, but the overreactions to literally every new BMW ever always crack me up. It leads to pages and pages of kvetching, REST IN PEACE BMW, NO MANUAL NO CARE REEEEEEEE, etc.
Then in a few years everyone will look back on it fondly and complain that “they don’t make Bimmers like they used to, and therefore the brand is dead to me”. Every single time. Anyway I think it looks like a really neat vehicle and second gen EVs are putting up some respectable numbers.
I agree the hate is overblown, especially among those who aren’t (and never will be) in the market for a $70,000 electric crossover.
For what it is, it looks like a competitive entry.
Like 70% of the internet is people complaining about things they aren’t interested in, have no reason to care about, or were never going to buy in the first place.
70% is generously low I think
Ok so this may sound a bit tin-foil hat like, but I suspect there is a coalition rising within the Tesla board that is growing more and more weary of Musk’s insane promises. He has for over a decade now promised full autonomy, which is always
“a year away” and is now spouting off fantastical and impossible growth figures. This pay package offer seems like an offer of “put up or shut up” which is forcing Musk to finally, actually, for real this time, actually deliver on a promise, instead of just spouting constant bullshit.
I mentioned this in a TMD a couple days ago, but the Optimus Robot is incredibly DOA. The Boston Dynamics spot dog starts at 75k, and is smaller, heavily limited, and useless at the sort of tasks that Optimus is allegedly going to perform. There is ZERO chance that Optimus will start south of 6-figures. With that in mind, the Global figure for 1% top income is 65k USD, roughly, and the US top 1% is about 400k income (pre-tax, importantly). I strongly doubt that anyone making less than 7-figures pre-tax, or 500k+ post-tax is even in a position to consider buying an Optimus bot. And with its limited usefulness in business applications and nearly non-existent positioning as a military tool, the market for these robots is firmly in the 4 to very low 5-figures of units per year territory at best.
All of this is to say, Elon can promise the world and shoot for the moon, but what he is proposing does not have a business case, and that’s not even touching on the absolutely foolish Robotaxi promises and goals. This pay package will never materialize, which I think is somewhat the point, when Elon crashes and burns at this scale, the growing percentage of disillusioned stock holders can finally try to push him out.
Tesla’s Autonomous promises are like Nuclear Fusion. “It’s 20 years away, and always will be.”
Except we’ve actually made some rather significant jumps in the Fusion department.
Right. Ext to Jason’s flying car
If he shoots for the moon I hope he is on onboard. MFing tool
Of a human being of course that is just my less than humble opinion
The Optimus robots aren’t going to be much of a seller to the public. Their real value will be on the factory floor – they’re perfect for assembly line/repetitive task operations.
Also they don’t call in sick; they don’t come to work with a hangover; they don’t lose focus because they found out their boyfriend/girlfriend was cheating on them; etc. Plus there’s no health care, wage or Social Security costs; the purchase can be wrapped into the budget as a capital improvement; etc. That’s all win after win for the stockholders.
They’ll also be useful on Mars, for construction and assembly work, to make the structures the (rich) humans will inhabit. My guess is that’s actually his real long term goal for these things. Selling them to us Earth-bounders is simply a means of funding their development and production.
That’s an on paper sales avenue, however robotics in production environments is already a very mature industry, and are all highly specialized for a reason, the things that require precision, repeatability and reliability benefit from specialized robots. A humanoid bot offers very little in the way of actual cost/reliability or other benefits. Then there’s the risk-reward equation to consider on a cost basis. Yes humans have recurring costs, but these Optimus bots will not be anywhere near cheap, will certainly have some maintenance requirements, and will not be proven technology.
There are massive risks to adopting a technology like a co-bot as a way to replace human workers, especially when that co-bot is supposedly going to be powered by an AI, which has very little proof in this sort of environment. The reality is hard-coded specialized robots are the best at what they do, and a generalized, smart, adaptable bot is neither proven enough nor cost effective enough to be considered a viable product for most or any company.
Not to mention the numerous amount of health and safety protocols and laws that need to be evaluated for a fully independent, high-strength robot, that should it go rogue (as Tesla’s with FSD are wont to do on the road) the risk to life and property is significant. This will be far from a plug-and-play human replacement, and if FSD crash lawsuits are anything to go by, there is a very expensive liability question that stockholders aren’t too fond of.
I’m also skeptical of any push for an industrial market given that Tesla and Musk have been entirely pushing a more retail co-bot type pitch for Optimus in press and launch materials. The price to performance of one of these is liable to make an Optimus a nothing more than a toy for the ultra-rich.
I get what you’re saying about industrial robots. It’s a very solid point. I was thinking more in terms of smaller scale manufacturing or batch work, where the cost of dedicated machinery can’t be justified, but a more general purpose robot that could be switched out (say for repair/maintenance) and re-employed at a different spot on the line might make better financial sense.
It would take a lot less capital investment for a small manufacturer or startup to get a new plant going, or perhaps make it worthwhile to experiment with a new product before committing to the full industrial robot investment.
But your point is well made – we’re not likely to see these things on say a vehicle assembly line. What can be handled by the robots has already been handed over to them.
Buy? Nobody is buying the robot. Leasing is where it’s at, just like a base model BMW 3-series. $2999 to take it home and $349 a month. Any chump can afford that, just like the BMW.
Here’s your friendly reminder that since 2015 the 1% have increased their wealth by nearly 34 trillion dollars, which is enough to end annual global poverty 22 times over.
That reminder does not feel friendly.
I was told that all that money trickles down to us poors. Are you saying that’s not the case?!?
Money actually trickles up from us poors to the wealthy
And here I thought it was some virtuos pyramid scheme where we buy Teslas, then the money we paid trickles back down to us, so then we can buy more Teslas. Teslas for everyone!
(to strike a less sarcastic tone though, I’ll be happy if there are indeed wonderful breakthroughs in technology that Tesla or another company can create to make lives better and more affordable. I’m just less confident in this company for obvious CEO and recent lackluster innovation related reasons)
I am confident that at this point any breakthroughs in technology by any company that can make life better and more affordable will instead be turned to their higher purpose: increasing shareholder value.
Which, as it turns out, will make life worse and less affordable.
The operative word is “trickle”, as in “almost none”
When they talk about “trickle-down economics” they’re not talking about money…
“If you eliminate the poor, you eliminate poverty.”
–tech bros, probably
You gotta think outside the box, bruh! Why are we even talking about housing them? That’s such old thinking!
Welp, methinks it’s time for a beer.
Using Musk’s normal timeline, he’s announced this happening on March 12th, 2026.
No, no. He announced it for April 20th, 2026 because it’s
Hitler’s birthdayall about the memes with him!420
Not sure why so many self-proclaimed alpha males admire Hitler. He died hiding in a bunker like a little bitch.
It’s the white supremacy part.
There’s nothing supreme about being overrun, plundered, and raped by the Slavic hordes called the Red Army.*
At least those Japanese generals defending the islands led their final banzai charges and died standing tall.
*sadly many in Eastern Europe seem pretty fond of them Nazis these days, despite the feeling not being reciprocal towards their ancestors