Tesla Gives Musk Some Stock

In 2018, Tesla Inc. gave Elon Musk, its chief executive officer and Technoking, a big package of stock options to motivate him to transform Tesla from about a $59 billion company into a trillion-dollar company. This worked. Tesla’s equity market capitalization peaked at about $1.5 trillion last year; it’s hovering around $1 trillion today. Musk’s “moonshot” package of stock options is worth, at today’s prices, about $87 billion. That is both a lot of money and kind of a bargain; it does seem unlikely that a different CEO would have added a trillion dollars of value to Tesla.

And then last year a Delaware judge ruled that this options package was invalid, for conflict-of-interest and disclosure reasons. (She found that Tesla’s board, which approved the options, was in Musk’s pocket, and that the outside shareholders who also approved it were not fully informed about the deal.) Tesla responded by: