On Thursday afternoon, Tesla shareholders will vote on a proposed pay package of extraordinary proportions for Elon Musk.
That package is conditional: Musk would earn no salary, but would unlock Tesla stock worth about a trillion dollars if the company meets certain criteria within the next decade.
Among other targets, he would have to raise the company's market capitalization, the value of all its stock put together, from about $1.5 trillion today to above $8.5 trillion.
For comparison, the most valuable company in the world, Nvidia — the chipmaker boosted by the AI boom — is worth $4.83 trillion. (Its CEO, who is seen as pivotal to the company's success, is paid $50 million per year and owns 3.5% of the company.)
Musk is already unfathomably wealthy, worth some $460 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That's thanks in large part to Tesla's soaring stock price, currently worth about $465 per share. (That's more than 400 times more valuable than at the company's IPO in 2010.)
A previous pay package that offered Musk a then-unprecedented $55.8 billion has been tied up in a lengthy court battle after a judge ruled that the board was too cozy with Musk in designing it. That case is still pending, and Tesla's board has made sure that Musk will receive tens of billions of dollars' worth of stock for his last few years of work, no matter how it is resolved.
But what about pay for his future work? Tesla's board argues that they need to incentivize him to "remain at Tesla and focus his unmatched leadership abilities" on the company, and that extraordinary results merit extraordinary pay. Even some of Musk's hard-core fans feel that, over the last few years, he has been distracted by politics and other projects, to the detriment of Tesla's efforts to sell cars. Tesla's profits have been down from last year throughout 2025.
The new package, like the previous one, is entirely based on performance and divided into twelve tranches. If Tesla's stock value grows to hit each of 12 targets, and Tesla also meets separate earnings or product-specific sales targets, Musk earns a tranche of stock for each pair of targets he hits. He won't be able to sell that stock immediately, to further incentivize him to stick around.
Tesla did not respond to a requests for comment, but the board has strongly advocated for this pay package in SEC filings and public comments. Supporters of the pay package emphasize that Musk only gets his big payday if Tesla's value grows enormously, boosting shareholders. Critics note that he could take home hundreds of billions even if he only unlocks a few relatively modest targets.
Musk only gets the full trillion-dollar prize if he pulls off the "Mars-shot" of hitting all the targets. (Technically, he could take home slightly less, because of some details governing how the restricted stock units would be granted. Of course, it could be more, if the stock growth beats the top target.)
A trillion dollars is hard to wrap your head around, so we did a little number crunching to put this extraordinary pay package in perspective.
$8.8 billion per year
All-stock compensation packages are tricky to value, because their true worth fluctuates with the company's share price. So what costs the company a small amount to give in 2025 might be worth an enormous amount in 2035, for instance.
Based on recent stock prices, Tesla's board values this pay package at around $88 billion, which is a small fraction of what Musk would actually receive if he hits his targets and Tesla stock soars. But even using that very conservative figure, it works out to $8.8 billion a year.
Glass Lewis, a proxy advisory firm, analyzes company books and recommends how shareholders should vote on decisions like this. The firm estimates that the entire S&P 500 combined paid all its CEOs about $9 billion last year. So Musk would make about as much as every other major corporate CEO combined — before factoring in stock growth.
28.8%
That's how much of Tesla's voting shares Musk would own if he unlocks the full pay package.
Musk and Tesla's board have publicly said it's this control — not the money — that is the real prize. "It's less about compensation and more about the voting influence," board chair Robyn Denholm told CNBC recently. Critics view it the same way. Tom Dinapoli, the comptroller of New York State, recently called the proposal "pay for unchecked power."
One of the pay package targets is for Tesla to sell a million robots. Tesla has been developing a humanoid robot called Optimus, designed to work in factories as well as homes. Musk imagines one for every person on Earth, all of them running Tesla software. And on an earnings call last month, he said he wants to make sure that if he builds what he calls a "robot army," he stays in charge of it.
"It's not like I'm going to go spend the money. It's just, if we build this robot army, do I have at least a strong influence over that robot army? Not control, but strong influence," Musk said. "I don't feel comfortable building that robot army if I don't have at least a strong influence."
33x
This pay package, by Tesla's own lowball valuation, is more than 33 times larger than the previous biggest-ever package … which was Musk's 2018 pay package, then given an equally conservative $2.6 billion valuation. (The value of that 2018 package today is actually above $100 billion, thanks to the rise in Tesla's share price.)
That 2018 package, meanwhile, was 33 times larger than the biggest award before that. Which was Elon Musk's 2012 pay package, worth approximately $78 million.
$942 billion
Glass Lewis has calculated that Musk would actually take home $942 billion once he hits the targets, after some payments he'd be required to make for tax purposes.
Musk has said he won't spend the money. But what could he buy if he did? To give a sense of scale, we pulled the numbers for some of the world's priciest luxury items.
Let's say Musk bought every single Rolls Royce sold in a year — last year that was 5,712 cars at about $500,000 each. That's $2.85 billion.
Let's say he also bought every yacht on offer for a year. Global yacht sales in the first quarter of this year were $1 billion, so call it $4 billion for the year.
How about a year's worth of jet sales? According to one estimate, the entire global private jet market will hit $39.84 billion this year.
So let's say that Musk buys every new Rolls-Royce, private jet and yacht sold in the entire world. And then does the same thing every year for a decade.
He'd still have $475 billion left over.
At press time, that's more money than the richest person on Earth possesses, according to the Bloomberg's Billionaires Index. That person is, of course, Elon Musk.
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