Tesla Shareholders Vote on Elon Musk's $1T Pay Package Today
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has a knack for creating drama. Thursday’s shareholder meeting, where investors will vote on his trillion-dollar gambit, is just another example.
Shareholder meetings are usually sleepy affairs, where investors typically approve accounting firms and listen to proposals about voting rights or corporate disclosures.
Tesla’s meetings are a little different; they’ve become must-see TV.
This year, Tesla shareholders will vote on a new pay package for Musk, which would award him approximately 425 million incentive-laden shares that vest if Musk meets financial and operational milestones over the next decade.
The targets culminate in an $8.5 trillion market capitalization and $400 billion in annual earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization for Tesla.
Achieving that market value would award the richest man in the world roughly $1 trillion.
To put that into perspective: Coming into the week, Tesla stock was up about 13% in 2025, valued at about $1.4 trillion. Shares need to compound at roughly 20% a year for the stock to be worth $8.5 trillion by 2035. That sounds feasible.
The Ebitda goal looks more aggressive. Tesla is expected to generate about $13 billion in Ebitda in 2025. That has to expand more than 30 times in 10 years to meet Musk’s target.
The operational milestones paired with the financial milestones tell investors how Tesla’s board expects Musk to get there.
Tesla must sell 20 million EVs cumulatively, have 10 million subscriptions for Tesla’s driver assistance product called Full Self Driving, deploy 1 million robo-taxis, and sell 1 million robots.
Selling the cars should be easy. Tesla has already sold about 8.5 million cars over its life.
The other goals are dependent on Tesla improving and deploying the AI technology it uses to train cars to drive themselves and robots to do useful tasks. Today, Tesla has a few hundred robotaxis on the roads. It doesn’t sell robots yet.
Whether a person is worth $1 trillion, Tesla’s pay philosophy is good corporate governance, or Tesla’s board is under Musk’s thumb will be debated far after all the votes are counted.
Thursday is only about the vote and understanding what Musk has to do to earn his trillion.