Tesla shareholders have overwhelmingly endorsed a massive pay package for CEO Elon Musk that could reach $1 trillion.
The pay package, crafted to ensure Musk's continued service to the electric vehicle manufacturer as it pursues breakthrough technology on artificial intelligence and robotics, won more than 75 percent support from shareholders, a Tesla official said at the company's annual meeting on Thursday.
Much like the compensation plan Tesla shareholders backed in 2018, the new 12-tier package ties Musk’s payout to an extraordinary goal: lifting Tesla’s market value to $8.5 trillion from about $1.4 trillion, while meeting several ambitious targets.
These include selling one million humanoid robots and securing 10 million paid subscriptions for its self-driving software.
To reach that valuation, Tesla’s stock would need to rise 466 percent from its current level, a figure that would push it about 70 percent higher than Nvidia, now the world’s most valuable company after reaching a $5 trillion market cap last week.
Rise of robot cars
Still, Tesla faces headwinds. Its sales and profits have slumped in the first half of the year, and the company is contending with the loss of US government incentives for electric vehicle buyers.
Musk and Tesla executives, however, remain undeterred. They say the company is evolving beyond electric cars, betting on a future built around self-driving vehicles, “robotaxis,” and humanoid robots.
Although the path is steep, the vote paves the way for Musk to become history’s first trillionaire.
Musk’s net worth is estimated at around $480 billion according to the latest Forbes real‑time list.
He is currently ranked as the world’s richest person.
Ranked after him are Oracle CEO Larry Ellison with a net worth of $350.7 billion, followed by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg with a net worth of $245.8 billion on the Forbes list.
After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania and dropping out of Stanford University, Musk banked his first millions when he sold an online publishing software company to US computer maker Compaq for more than $300 million in 1999.
