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At a shareholder meeting, Tesla decided to agree to maverick tech head Elon Musk’s demand for a US$1 trillion pay package.

More than 75 per cent of shareholders agreed to it, and the vast majority of institutional investors voted in favour.

James Murdoch, a Board member of Tesla, agreed to the whopping pay package.

The huge pay package will span 10 years and be split into 12 tranches.

Both shareholders and board members see Elon Musk as the face and future of Tesla, and if he had walked away, the company would not be in a position to ascend new heights, with the share price possibly nose-diving.

This is the biggest payout ever awarded to a corporate leader. Tesla has also agreed to invest in Musk’s company xAI.

Musk will have to meet several deliverables that he says he will have no trouble meeting.

These include: 

1. Ensuring that Tesla sees 1 million robo-taxis in operation
2. Deliver 20 million vehicles in the next ten years.
3. Tesla’s stock price must continually rise
4. Tesla, which is now valued at US$1.5 trillion, will first have to surpass US$2 trillion, then over US$8 trillion in valuation
5. Musk must increase Tesla’s pre-tax profits from US$15 billion (today) to over US$4,400 billion over the agreed-upon period.

The Tesla CEO has a 15 per cent stake in the company.

Some corporate analysts believed that Musk’s pay demand is very excessive, while others believe his genius is Tesla’s secret sauce.

Tesla also voted on its political neutrality policy. This year, Musk aligned himself with President Donald Trump and headed his DOGE agency to make government operations more efficient and cut bureaucracy. During his tenure at DOGE, Tesla sales fell, so too did its share price.

Tesla’s board members are now vigilant about its CEO engaging in political activity and taking positions likely to be detrimental to Tesla.

Musk is planning to launch and scale humanoid robots.

Should Musk have been awarded such a huge payday?

CEO of Ark Invest, Cathie Wood, believes he should and deserves it.

“No one has delivered a compound annual rate of growth (EBITDA) of 41 per cent over ten years. If he can deliver on this, the stock is going to outperform enormously. Tesla is doing things the right way,” said Wood.

What we are seeing now is that the corporate world is betting on AI. Valuations of some of these tech companies are going through the roof. Can tech stocks keep growing at this rate?

On November 5th, 2025, President and CEO of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang, writing in the Financial Times, said, “China is going to win the AI race.”

China’s DeepSeek has gone the open software route and is making a lot of headway.

Tesla sees Elon Musk as its champion and feels he can take on and better Chinese advancements. This pay hike is a vote of confidence in Musk’s leadership and vision for the company.

This performance bonus scheme will see Elon Musk become the world’s first trillionaire and he now stands to pick up an additional 423 million Tesla shares.

After thanking both shareholders and Board members for the vote of confidence, Musk said: “ What we are about to embark upon is not a new chapter of the future of Tesla but a new book.”

Tesla’s share price closed at US$463.80 today.