Tesla has proposed a large new $1 trillion compensation bundle for its CEO Elon Musk, and most of the benchmarks he must hit are merely watered-down variations of guarantees he’s spent years making in regards to the firm.
That’s not the image Tesla’s board of administrators paints within the firm’s annual proxy assertion, the place they revealed the proposed pay bundle. As an alternative, the board focuses on the way it plans to create “probably the most invaluable firm in historical past.”
To make sure, if Tesla accomplishes all that it goals for with this deal, it would appear to be a a lot totally different firm on the finish of the 10-year interval it covers. That doesn’t change the truth that the milestones the corporate is asking Musk to goal for are much less formidable than his personal previously-stated targets.
Whereas the unprecedented pay bundle nonetheless must be authorised by shareholders at a gathering in November, it’s straightforward to see the corporate’s fervent fan base voting “sure.” Earlier votes on Musk’s compensation have been overwhelmingly authorised by Tesla’s shareholders.
With that in thoughts, let’s check out what Musk wants to perform to be able to obtain the total payout.
20 million automobiles … whole
Musk spent years claiming Tesla would be capable of make 20 million electrical automobiles per yr by 2030. This was again when he and his firm had been nonetheless promising to develop at a charge of fifty% annually.
However Tesla walked away from these guarantees as gross sales development stalled, after which reversed in 2024. The corporate then pulled the 20-million-per-year objective from its impression report final yr, and stopped constructing a deliberate manufacturing facility in Mexico that would have elevated manufacturing.
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Now, the primary “product objective” that Tesla’s board of administrators laid out for Musk to attain on his path to changing into a trillionaire is to ship 20 million automobiles whole. Tesla has already offered eight million automobiles so far, and even with gross sales slumping, is shifting simply shy of two million per yr.
With the brand new pay bundle being laid out over a 10-year interval, meaning the goal has gone from 20 million EVs per yr by 2030 to simply 20 million whole by 2035.
A million robotaxis*
Certainly one of Musk’s most notorious and outrageous guarantees about Tesla got here in 2019, when he claimed that the corporate would have a million robotaxis on the street in 2020. It’s now 2025, and Tesla has solely simply begun to trial a robotaxi service in Austin, Texas that has, at most, round 20 or 30 automobiles with security drivers on board.
To entry his full proposed pay bundle, Tesla is asking Musk to assist the corporate notice an altered model of that promise, as one other product objective listed is to have “1 million Robotaxis in Industrial Operation.”
It’s a objective with caveats. The high quality print exhibits that Tesla is barely requiring there to be a “day by day common combination” of 1 million robotaxis “commercially operated by or on behalf of [Tesla] over a consecutive three-month interval, as a part of a transportation service.”
Tesla goes on to outline “Robotaxi” as any Tesla car, together with however not restricted to the purpose-built “Cybercab” it’s creating, that’s utilizing the corporate’s Full Self-Driving software program to supply rides to folks.
This consists of customer-owned automobiles, which is one other factor Musk has lengthy promised however by no means delivered. He’s spent years claiming that Tesla might flip a digital change and switch present automobiles into fully-autonomous ones, and that house owners might add and subtract these automobiles to a bigger robotaxi fleet at will.
However Musk has since mentioned most of the Teslas at the moment on the street don’t have the mandatory {hardware} for the previous to occur, and the corporate has but to show the latter. Regardless, Musk now has a good looser timeline to try to make each issues occur.
A million “bots”?
Musk sees Tesla’s future being all in regards to the humanoid robotic that it’s creating, referred to as Optimus. Simply this week he claimed it might make up as a lot as 80% of the corporate’s future income.
As he turned more and more centered on Optimus, Musk made some fairly wild guarantees about what that future would appear to be. Certainly one of his core claims was that Tesla will probably be making a million Optimus bots per yr by as early as 2029.
And but, Tesla’s board is barely asking Musk to ship a million “bots” whole as a part of this proposed compensation plan. Tesla additionally defines “bots” as “any robotic or different bodily product with mobility utilizing synthetic intelligence manufactured by or on behalf of the Firm” — although the corporate’s automobiles don’t rely.
The administrators appear to agree that Optimus has “the potential to be Tesla’s bestselling product,” they usually say it reperesents “the clearest instance of how Tesla has the power to make autonomy profit all of humanity.”
However the board additionally notes that “commercialization plans” for Optimus are “nonetheless in growth,” and Musk now has till 2035 to succeed in the a million mark.
The whole lot else
The fourth and closing product objective Musk has to attain is to notch 10 million energetic subscriptions to Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) software program. It’s arguably probably the most formidable product objective. The corporate doesn’t say what number of present house owners have paid for FSD, although executives have lately mentioned the adoption charge is within the “teenagers.” At finest, meaning wherever from a couple of hundred thousand to the low tens of millions of Tesla automobiles have the software program put in.
The whole lot else Tesla’s board is asking of Musk is tied to cash. In the end, Musk wants to assist Tesla attain an $8.5 trillion valuation to be able to unlock the total worth of the compensation bundle and change into a trillionaire himself.
Musk already had grand designs to perform one thing comparable. He has usually claimed that Tesla might at some point change into extra invaluable than Apple and Saudi Aramco mixed. At their present valuations, these two firms are collectively value round $5.5 trillion. However earlier this yr, the CEO claimed Tesla might be value greater than the subsequent 5 most-valuable firms mixed — which on the time meant he was aiming nearer to the $15 trillion mark.
Together with the objective of blowing up Tesla’s valuation, Musk is being requested to extend the corporate’s earnings to, primarily, $400 billion per yr — an unlimited determine in comparison with final yr’s earnings of round $17 billion.
Lastly, Tesla’s board has requested for 2 notable assurances from Musk to be able to unlock the total worth of the compensation bundle. One is that he should work with the corporate to develop a plan for a way he will probably be succeeded as CEO of Tesla (and the plan primarily locks him to the corporate for no less than 7.5 years).
The opposite, buried in a footnote, is that Tesla obtained “assurances that Musk’s involvement with the political sphere would wind down in a well timed method.”
Taken as a complete, it’s a fancy settlement with numerous actually pie-in-the-sky concepts about the place Tesla might go beneath Musk’s management over the subsequent decade. The identical was mentioned in regards to the earlier compensation deal that Tesla struck with Musk again in 2018, and but the corporate hit all of these seemingly-outrageous targets. (Musk’s award was in the end dusted by Delaware’s Chancery Court docket.)
Nonetheless, it’s laborious to not discover simply how a lot these new targets seem to return from the corporate attempting to pull its CEO’s guarantees again right down to Earth.
