On Thursday, Tesla shareholders approved CEO Elon Musk’s pay package worth as much as $878 billion, an outcome that was widely expected. Musk received 75% approval in the vote. The compensation plan will hand over that wealth in 12 tranches of stock, provided various milestones are hit over the next decade.
The vote occurred at Tesla’s annual shareholder’s meeting in Austin, Texas, and the first milestone that would unlock one of Musk’s 12 payments would be Tesla reaching a market cap of $2 trillion. The company’s market cap currently sits at $1.4 trillion.
Other metrics include delivering 20 million Tesla vehicles, as well as deploying 1 million robotaxis and 1 million humanoid robots. Musk currently holds about 13% of Tesla shares and, if all of the milestones are hit, he would increase his stake to about 25%, according to CNBC.
A deserving Musk gets his package!
— Jim Cramer (@jimcramer) November 6, 2025
There’s a broad consensus that Musk’s association with far-right politics in 2024 and 2025 has harmed Tesla’s brand among the company’s more liberal customer base, but shareholders are still convinced that the electric carmaker would be much worse off if he wasn’t around.
Musk had threatened to turn his attention elsewhere if he didn’t get his payday, but he’s already distracted by ostensibly running many other companies, including SpaceX, The Boring Company, xAI, and X. Officially, X doesn’t have a CEO right now, but Musk is largely seen as the one in charge and there doesn’t appear to be any real urgency to find a new head to replace Linda Yaccarino, who left in the summer.
Musk hitched his wagon to President Donald Trump, spending nearly $300 million to get him elected in 2024. Musk was the head of DOGE and took a chainsaw to the federal government, while also throwing up Nazi-style salutes. As a result, many potential Tesla customers were turned off and started placing bumper stickers on their cars like “I bought this before Elon went crazy.” Tesla has seen steep declines in sales across most of Europe, with sales in Norway down 50%, sales in the Netherlands down 48%, and sales in Spain down 30%, according to Bloomberg.
Musk, the wealthiest man in the world, insisted in the lead up to the vote that he deserved the pay package and it wasn’t actually about the money. The billionaire claimed that he needed the vote from shareholders to have influence over Tesla’s “robot army,” trying to suggest that his developments with the Optimus robot could be dangerous if they fall into the wrong hands. Musk has made similar claims about AI potentially destroying humanity if not guided correctly against what he calls the “woke mind virus.”
Musk has tried to pivot Tesla in recent years from an electric car company into something much harder to define. The billionaire CEO wants people to think of Tesla as a technology company, investing in AI and robotics, but Musk’s carnival barker attitude often means he promises big things and delivers something much more humble.
For example, Musk promised to build a mass transit system called the Loop in 2018 which initially included autonomous 16-passenger vehicles zipping around underground at speeds of 155 miles per hour. The concept video, which was originally posted to Vimeo before being deleted years later, was quite impressive.
But when it came time to actually build the thing Musk had promised, he created a short tunnel underneath Las Vegas. No special new vehicle, no high speed, no autonomy. It was just regular old Teslas slowly driven by humans in a short tunnel.
Musk loves to create hype when his companies are struggling. And then, when the sugar rush wears off, he moves on to the next thing. What’s the next over-hyped promise? Robots, for sure. But he’s also teasing the idea of a flying car, which he told podcaster Joe Rogan last week could be demonstrated before the end of this year.
Shareholders voted to give Musk a $56 billion pay package in 2018 that was also dependent on hitting 12 different milestones, including increased market capitalization of $50 billion up to $650 billion. But a judge in Delaware has shot down that compensation plan because it had misleading and incomplete information. That package is still being fought over in the courts. Musk said the judge was a “radical far left activist cosplaying as a judge,” an accusation he often makes of anyone to the left of Augusto Pinochet.
Elon Musk is worth $492 billion, according to the latest estimates by Forbes. Tesla’s stock closed down 3% to $445 per share on Thursday, but ticked up 3% in after hours trading after the announcement.
