Tesla proposes trillion-dollar compensation package for Elon Musk
By BBC, September 6, 2025The governing board for the electric carmaker Tesla has put forward a pay package for CEO Elon Musk that could make him the world’s first trillionaire — but only if he meets a series of high-performance standards over the next 10 years.
The proposal became public on Friday, as part of the company’s regulatory filings.
Musk is already considered one of the world’s wealthiest businessmen, and one of his eye-popping pay packages from 2018 continues to be the subject of a legal battle.
But if approved, the latest proposal would likely be the largest corporate pay package in United States history.
Tesla shareholders will vote on the compensation scheme on November 6. The regulatory filing indicated that the plan had already undergone a review from a committee of independent directors.
“This is a ridiculously large pay package. It raises lots of questions,” Brian Quinn, a professor at Boston College Law School, told the news agency Reuters.
Quinn added he had little doubt about how the shareholders would vote.
“Given that Tesla’s stock price is basically all vibes and appears to have very little to do with the automaker’s actual performance, I suspect they will approve this package.”
In the regulatory filing, Tesla leaders indicated that they felt Musk deserved the higher compensation range, despite the carmaker’s recent wobbles on Wall Street.
“Traditional compensation packages granted to executives at other companies were determined not to be appropriate for designing Musk’s incentive compensation,” the filing explained
What are the terms?
To earn the trillion-dollar pay package, Musk would have meet ambitious benchmarks for Tesla, reversing its drooping sales and increasing its total value and car production over the next decade.
In the short term, Musk would have to boost Tesla’s valuation to Ksh258 trillion. By the end of the plan, Tesla would have to reach a value target of Ksh1.1 quadrillion.
Currently, the company is worth about Ksh133 trillion — roughly the same amount as the proposed compensation package.
By the end of the 10-year term, Tesla would have also had to deliver 20 million vehicles in total. Last year, the company delivered just under 2 million vehicles.
Other benchmarks include putting a million self-driving robotaxis in operation and delivering one million artificial intelligence (AI) bots.
As part of the 10-year plan, Musk would also have to develop a long-term “framework” to name a successor as Tesla’s CEO.
All of Musk’s compensation in the proposed pay package would come in the form of Tesla shares, given based on performance metrics. He would receive no salary or cash bonuses.
Musk would have to stay with the company for at least seven and a half years to cash out any of the shares he earns. If he stays until 2035, for the full 10 years, he would be eligible for the full amount.
Currently, Musk holds about 13 percent of Tesla’s shares. The plan puts an additional 12 percent in his reach. That would give him greater power in shareholder meetings.