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Tesla’s proposed $1 trillion pay package for Musk faces investor push back
(www.aljazeera.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2025
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It might be interesting to create structures for more shareholder oversight over executive pay.
I'm probably far less concerned about executive pay in general than a number of people here, but my understanding is that in Musk's case, there have been real questions about the board's independence.
And Musk has had what I'd call some real errors. I am pretty skeptical about his high profile politicking being good for Tesla. Even if he wanted to support Trump, he certainly did not need to become the face of DOGE or be personally doing his $1m lotteries for voting. The Cybertruck flopped.
And he's not doing Tesla as a full-time job. He's also CEO, chairman, and CTO of SpaceX.
It's also not clear to me that even if he can grow an early stage company, that he's great at dealing with a mature one. Tesla has the largest market cap of any automaker in the world by a large margin. They aren't a startup any more.
https://companiesmarketcap.com/automakers/largest-automakers-by-market-cap/
I'm dubious that Tesla couldn't obtain a CEO who could do at least as effective a job for far less pay.
I reckon I could do that job more effectively than Musk, and I'm a fucking idiot with regards to business. I'd do it for a mere two million dollars a year.
I would agree. You could probably designate a chimp as CEO, make sure they are hidden away, and let the rest of the company operate as needed.
That's effectively already how SpaceX manages to function, they (allegedly) have an entire team of people dedicated to distracting Musk with bullshit whenever he visits the office so that the actual engineers can work in peace without their CEO mandating stupid ideas.
They saw the "Human eyes don't have LIDAR so Teslas don't need them either" and said yeah, fuck that, we can't allow him input here.
I'd do it for $100k a year, because it would remove Musk from power in that particular place and save people from harassment while I could comfortably live off the wage.
Don't sell yourself short, my friend.
Thank you for your vote of confidence!
But nah, for those 1-3 hours daily that Musk can alot to that specific task, $100k per year would be ok for me.
Hell, I could do nothing and just let the engineers do their job and I'd be by orders of magnitude better than that lunatic.
Isn't he supposedly operating six companies? Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, The Boring Company, Neuralink, and X?
Every time I hear some apologist for the extremist position of executive pay that we are operating under, I now think of this guy. In at least his case, it's clearly a part-time job for one or more of these companies.
Oddly, most companies frown on the average worker doing any moonlighting. They want you exclusively working for one company, at least for white-collar jobs. Doesn't seem to apply to executives, since it's fairly common for them to also sit on the boards of other companies, even if it's not common for them to be operating six companies...
What I find particularly problematic is the conflict of interest between Tesla and xAI, especially because Elon has a higher percentage of ownership of the latter.
It's clear that Tesla is priced not as a car manufacturer, but as a technology company with high (arguably delusional) hopes towards self driving, compute and robotics. However that kind of seems like a natural area to expand into for xAI as well. So why should Elon do it at Tesla where he has less ownership?
Btw xAI acquired X, so one less company. From what I remember at the time the purchase felt like Elon taking advantage of other investors and getting a very favorable deal for himself due to the company evaluations, which increased his ownership stake in the combined company.