But put yourself in the shoes of us poor shareholders who have to make a decision about how to vote. Would we rather have our $1,400,000,000,000 company maybe go to 7x to $10,000,000,000,000 and give 10% of that to the guy who took us there? Considering that it was close to bankruptcy in 2008 when that guy took over as CEO in 2008, and up to $1,600,000,000 at the IPO in 2010, and now up another 875x to $1400,000,000,000 (a lot more zeros) today, and that Musk would have to take it up another 7x to $10,000,000,000,000 to get this extravagant bonus. And the problem being that if that happens under Musk as CEO, he takes $1,000,000,000,000, so there's only $9,000,000,000,000 left to divvy up amongst us other shareholders who don't work there?

I'd take that part of the deal. But I wouldn't take the rest of the deal that comes with it. The first two tranches require that the market cap increase to $2.5 trillion and Tesla sells 20 millions vehicles in ten years.

Achieving the first one requires a CAGR of about 6.8%. That's less than the 10 average of the S&P 500. No one holding Tesla stock right now is anticipating a CAGR of only 6.8%. They are betting on a whole lot more than that. Otherwise you might as well just hold the index.

It isn't clear if the second goal requires selling 20 million cars in ten years, or 20 million total. But it doesn't matter too much. Tesla makes about 1.8 million units a year and the EV market is expanding by 10-20% per year. Tesla should be able to hit that target just by maintaining market share. So selling only 20 million should be considered a disappointment. It also means the dreams of fleets of robotaxis didn't materialize along with the opportunity for a large volume of high margin FSD subscriptions. That would be another disappointment for most shareholders.

But Elon delivers these disappointing results, he gets $28 billion. That is orders of magnitude more than any CEO not named Elon Musk has ever been paid. Elon might be the only guy who can get them to $8.5 trillion, but he's not the only guy who can get them to $2.5 trillion. Paying somebody that much for those results is shareholder abuse.