Tesla’s profit fell 37 percent in the third quarter. Yet Elon Musk is demanding a pay package of $1 trillion.
A trillion dollars is hard to envision. It’s a thousand billion. It’s a million million. It’s almost the entire GDP of Indonesia, a country of 284 million people. It’s the annual output of North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho, Arkansas, Mississippi, and West Virginia put together. It’s close to Tesla’s entire current market value.
Elon is demanding $1 trillion even as the legal battle continues over his 2018 pay package, then valued at a relatively paltry $56 billion. (He’s now seeking a package that’s roughly 18 times the size of that contested plan.)
Tesla’s shareholders will be voting on this absurd pay package next week, but it’s not just other Tesla shareholders who’ll be shafted if Elon gets what he’s seeking. Musk is moving the national goal posts for CEO pay all the way to Mars, at a time when American CEOs are already getting paid far more than they’re worth by any reasonable accounting of their contributions to the U.S. economy.
Tesla’s board — handpicked by Elon — is telling Tesla shareholders that the trillion-dollar pay package is necessary to keep Musk “focused and incentivized.” The board’s words in proposing the $1 trillion package are worth repeating:
“Musk also raised the possibility that he may pursue other interests that may afford him greater influence. Simply put, retaining and incentivizing Elon is fundamental to Tesla … becoming the most valuable company in history.”
But he’s already Tesla’s largest shareholder. He’s raking in billions. He’s the richest person on the planet. If he’s not already adequately motivated to stay focused on Tesla, why the hell does his board believe a trillion dollars will do the trick?
What are the “other interests” that could possibly “afford him greater influence?” He might devote more time to supporting authoritarian movements around the world, such as his favored far-right AfD party in Germany. Or the right-wing leaders in Italy, the Netherlands, the UK, and Argentina who he’s been pushing for. Or to his makeover of X into a cesspool of right-wing bigotry.
If not adequately paid to stay focused on Tesla, his attention might drift to one of his other businesses, such as the Boring Company, which is now digging a tunnel under Nashville for a Tesla-powered “people mover.”
That tunnel, by the way, doesn’t have the approval of Nashville officials, who are worried about it with good reason. Boring has dug one such tunnel under Las Vegas, where Nevada officials have charged the company with violating environmental regulations nearly 800 times over the last two years for such things as releasing untreated water onto city streets, spilling muck from its trucks, and flooding. Nashville officials worry that flooding there could be far worse because Nashville gets 10 times the amount of rainfall as Vegas.
Musk’s Boring Company says it will eventually do an environmental impact study, but excavation is already underway. Sort of like taking a wrecking ball to the East Wing after promising you’ll leave it intact.
Or Musk could be distracted by his SpaceX business, which is so behind on its moon landing contract that Trump is reopening bidding on it, causing Musk to go on an epithet-laden social media tirade.
I naively assumed that once he stopped running Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (or DOGE) and went back to the private sector, Musk would pose less of a hazard to humanity. I was wrong.
Some say that even with his faults — his greed, his support for right-wing regimes, his public-be-damned approach to everything he does, the mess he made at DOGE, the cesspool he’s made of X — Musk is so innovative that he’s still a net positive for humanity.
What do you think?
- Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
- Robert Reich's new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org.
