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For a few precarious hours last week, Elon Musk reportedly lost his title as the world’s richest man. Larry Ellison, the mustachioed yachtsman behind the software giant Oracle, got to wear that crown for almost a full business day before Musk’s wealth inched up yet again, eclipsing Ellison’s $383 billion fortune by a sliver.
Phew! Luckily for Musk, Tesla’s board of directors already has a plan to keep its man on top for good—and make him a trillionaire in the process. The scheme is a key component of the electric-car manufacturer’s road map for its next 10 years: Ahead of Tesla’s annual general meeting in November, the board is proposing that if Musk carries the company to an $8.5 trillion valuation—well beyond what any other firm is worth right now—and meets certain operational milestones, he gets a bundle of stock that would be worth about $900 billion at those prices. Another way to conceptualize it is that if shareholders accept the board’s proposals, and Musk succeeds, he would be personally rewarded with more than 80 percent of the current market value of his company.
This is, by any metric, an obscene amount of money. And it’s curious at a time when the famously mercurial CEO’s attention seems to be everywhere but Tesla. Not only does Musk own several companies that are not Tesla (Neuralink, The Boring Company, xAI and its subsidiary X, and SpaceX and its subsidiary Starlink), two of which he is chief executive of; not only did he take on (and then explosively depart) a prominent advisory role in the Trump administration; not only does he spend days and nights sharing his far-right political views on social media. He also appears less and less interested in Tesla’s core business—electric vehicles—acknowledging that Tesla is in for some “rough quarters” on that front. Why, then, has the board chosen this moment to present an almost trillion-dollar compensation package to the broader community of shareholders?
It comes down to what Elon Musk means for the company. In 2025, this board has apparently come to believe that Musk’s presence alone is part of what’s keeping Tesla’s valuation so far above every other car company in the world. It’s the figure of Elon himself, in spite of the wildcat tendencies and fiscal risks imposed therein, that make him worth this world-historic amount of money. Musk, who now owns approximately 13 percent of Tesla, has said publicly that if he can’t increase that stake to “~25” percent, he might just turn his attention elsewhere. With this compensation package, the board (of which he is a member) is proposing to give him just what he asked for: a bid for his attention.
“There’s this perception that Tesla cannot succeed without Elon, that essentially Elon is Tesla, and a lot of the valuation in Tesla is this perception of what he will do with the future,” the investor Ross Gerber, once a prominent Tesla bull, told me. “So I guess the result was, ‘Let’s just give him the whole company.’”
Tesla’s nine-member board—which includes Elon and his brother, Kimbal Musk; an Airbnb co-founder, Joe Gebbia; and the media scion James Murdoch—has echoed that sentiment. “Our singular CEO requires one-of-a-kind compensation that will incentivize him to dedicate his time, energy and considerable talents to Tesla, delivering unprecedented growth for Tesla shareholders,” goes one particularly sycophantic line in a preface to the proposals.
The reverential posture may have something to do with the board’s own eye-watering compensation packages. In May, The New York Times reported that the board chair, Robyn Denholm, had made more than $530 million by cashing in on Tesla stock during her tenure. (In a recent interview, she called the public fixation on the dollar-value of Musk’s compensation package “misplaced.”) Her defense speaks to the board’s mindset: “The people around Elon who can deal with him believe he’s some sort of God,” Gerber said. “It’s kind of like a religion: If you’re on the Tesla board, you’re like an apostle. And so they buy into all of this.”
Typically, the boards of publicly traded companies like to minimize risk to shareholders. This is both because it’s the surest path to long-term growth, and because it is illegal not to; if a rogue executive decides to tank the company, that could easily be considered a lapse in the board’s commitment to protecting its shareholders’ best interests. Somehow, Tesla always seems to power through its CEO’s antics, whether a social-media post that leads to a shareholder revolt and a $40 million settlement with regulators or an apparent Nazi salute at a Trump rally. Stunts like these have almost certainly cost the company money and tarnished the brand. But this board appears to believe that Tesla remains Tesla, premium and all, purely because of the perception that Musk just might usher humanity into the future.
There’s still a chance, however slim, that Musk delivers on that future—the non-Musk directors aren’t totally off base here. If Musk were to somehow fully recommit himself to Tesla, to reorient his private and public life around the project of generating value for his core business, the company might just have a shot at creating astronomical returns. The board is betting on a future where Musk’s innovation and focus are revived. Musk, for his part, still seems to think he’s got what it takes: On Friday, he bought about $1 billion worth of Tesla shares.
Then again, this is someone who has spent the five days since the assassination of Charlie Kirk amplifying division on X. For good or ill, Tesla’s public image is deeply entwined with Musk, far more than with its cars or its incoming army of humanoid robots. Does that sound like a trillion-dollar idea?
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Today’s News
- Vice President J. D. Vance, who has called Charlie Kirk a friend, hosted The Charlie Kirk Show from the White House to “pay tribute” to Kirk.
- The Trump administration announced that the U.S. and China have reached a tentative deal on TikTok, just days before a deadline that could have banned the app. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called it a “framework,” while Chinese officials said both sides agreed on a “basic consensus” and will work to finalize the details.
- President Donald Trump announced that three people were killed in a second U.S. military strike on a Venezuelan boat in international waters, following an earlier strike this month that killed 11 people. The U.S. claims that the boat it struck earlier this month was linked to drug trafficking; Venezuelan officials deny that claim.
Dispatches
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