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> On Thursday, he said shareholders who voted against him were “oathbreakers.”

That's certainly warped perspective.

Loyalty, noun - The quality of Doing What I Say
Seems in line with his new friends and their attitudes
Does he think he’s a feudal lord or something? Absurd.
AFAICT Tesla's 2023 profit was only around 15 billion, and Musk owns about ~20% of the company... so it seems reasonable the other 80% of the stakeholders might be a little concerned about this odd transfer of money.
He wouldn’t be getting profits or a cash transfer but more ownership of the company. It’s options that at the time when they were thought up the company was worth far less. The number quoted now is only as giant as it is because Tesla is valued far higher than any other car maker.
He used to own 20%; it's dropped to 13% or so.
‘“The chair of Tesla’s board, Robyn Denholm, wrote in a message to shareholders that “Elon delivered the type of growth that most thought was impossible.”’

He didn’t do it all. The company of very smart people got them there. Sure he is the CEO but… he couldn’t do it all himself.

Those are weasel words and you know it.

Ford and GM have more and better engineers than Tesla, but can't achieve what he did.

Rivian and Lucid are full of Ex-Tesla employees, again, aren't at the same level of profitability and production levels Tesla had when it was their age.

(same for space, Boeing with engineers, Blue Origin with Billionaire money. Etc etc)

The difference is him. Recognize it and account for it.

you don't have to like him or his products, you just have to admit he's the lego piece that made that makes the toy work

Those aren't weasel words, they're the honest truth.

In fact if you want weasel words, follow Musk (although that's more a rabid weasel ... or perhaps a hyena).

If Twitter's decline is anything to go by, one might assume that Tesla succeeded despite Musk ... just a right product at the right time ... and he got lucky.

What did he do though? Bet on electric vehicles taking off? Okay. Right place, right time. That’s not very magical.
But he didn't "bet". He worked to make it happen. He didn't just invest money, he invested his time.

No magic, just hard work and sheer pigheadedness.

You don't have to like him, but we can't pretend the last 15 years didn't happen. It happened, and happened because of him.

This isn't reddit, we need to accept reality here.

You think he was the only smart guy in the room? He was the money man who happened to be smart. But to pull off Tesla requires a ton of smart people not just Elon. So no. This isn’t Reddit but this isn’t also X.com. Reality exists here.
Those smart people require direction and orders, and are paid as such.

Should they build permanent magnet motors or induction motors?

Should they use aluminum or steel? so on and so forth.

And these decision rest with the C-Suite and ultimately the CEO, and if they make the right calls, the company succeeds, sales increase and the share prices rises, making shareholders happy. If not...

And making the right call depends on the skills of the CEO, in this case both the business and engineering (yes, specifically that) skills of Elon Musk.

He used them, made some bad calls, made some good calls, but over they years made enough right calls to that he was kept on as CEO for multiple years in a row, and he made everyone rich.

Employees were paid, Board members were paid, he should be paid too.

Don't like him? Pay his dues and fire him.

Pay him his dues? He’s fully vested. He has enough equity. More equity isn’t going to make him focus on Tesla more it’s just going to pay for Twitter.
Nah he was kept on because he became larger than life and gave Tesla huge marketing reach for basically free. What other car brand didn’t need to advertise but yet grew mindshare?
Ford still outsells Tesla by a lot. Mercedes is eating Tesla lunch on the luxury segment and cheaper cars are arriving while Elon is distracted with Twitter. Electric hype is slowing down and resale prices are plummeting.

Count me skeptical about a 46B pay package to a part time employee thats constant bad PR.

I think it's simple. He's the pied piper who made the impossible happen for Tesla shareholders, pay the man or he brings out the flute again.

I was alive and online when the pay package was announced (21 March 2018), and I remember how much it was NOT certain any of this would come to fruition.

It's simple, he was shown ~2 Bn worth of shares and told he would get them only if he converted the shares to 56 Bn.

You (the big institutional shareholders AND the small shareholders) were greedy and knew what he would do, you paid for alchemy and he made gold from lead, don't cry now.

____

disclaimer: not an american, not a shareholder or user of his products (not even paypal lol, it doesn't work in my country)

Except in the real world when the "pied piper brings out his flute again" he goes to jail.
He doesn't have to do anything illegal.

He could just resign and move to xAI or whatever the fsck he raised that $6Bn for last week.

Or to SpaceX.

Or to Neuralink.

Or to Boring Company.

Or Twitter/X.

or to whatever stupid thing his ADHD brain is fixated on next.

The problem is all the shadiness and sloppiness. Hopium of Optimus isn’t worth $50B. Maybe $2B. And even $50B may not be enough to compete with Sammy and chatgpt.
The share price rose as per the defined metrics, and with that shareholder wealth.

It's up to the market and their stupid analysts to judge how much they value all the various hopiums (autopilo/FSD, 4680, large castings, Optimus, etc etc)

Shareholders agreed to that, and he met those standards. If you didn't like the metrics, you should voted against it in 2018, and upon failure, sold the shares.

But if you kept the shares, and enjoyed the multiple share prices increases, then it meant you agreed.

Then after paying, by all means fire him. His current performance is lacking, after all.

But if the Shareholders and Board vote to keep him, and yet vote not to pay him, then it's absurd.

> Shareholders agreed to that, and he met those standards. If you didn't like the metrics, you should voted against it in 2018, and upon failure, sold the shares.

I'm in favour of lower executive compensation in all publicly traded companies I hold (which, due to ETFs, is nearly every publicly traded company), I can't very well stop holding stock of every company that doesn't decrease executive compensation.