\n<\/p>\n
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.<\/p>\n
For a few precarious hours last week, Elon Musk reportedly lost his title as the world\u2019s richest man. Larry Ellison, the mustachioed yachtsman behind the software giant Oracle, got to wear that crown for almost a full business day before Musk\u2019s wealth inched up yet again, eclipsing Ellison\u2019s $383 billion fortune by a sliver.<\/p>\n
Phew! Luckily for Musk, Tesla\u2019s board of directors already has a plan to keep its man on top for good\u2014and make him a trillionaire in the process. The scheme is a key component of the electric-car manufacturer\u2019s road map for its next 10 years: Ahead of Tesla\u2019s annual general meeting in November, the board is proposing that if Musk carries the company to an $8.5 trillion valuation\u2014well beyond what any other firm is worth right now\u2014and meets certain operational milestones, he gets a bundle of stock that would be worth about $900 billion at those prices. Another way to conceptualize it is that if shareholders accept the board\u2019s proposals, and Musk succeeds, he would be personally rewarded with more than 80 percent of the current market value of his company.<\/p>\n
This is, by any metric, an obscene amount of money. And it\u2019s curious at a time when the famously mercurial CEO\u2019s attention seems to be everywhere but Tesla. Not only does Musk own several companies that are not Tesla (Neuralink, The Boring Company, xAI and its subsidiary X, and SpaceX and its subsidiary Starlink), two of which he is chief executive of; not only did he take on (and then explosively depart) a prominent advisory role in the Trump administration; not only does he spend days and nights sharing his far-right political views on social media. He also appears less and less interested in Tesla\u2019s core business\u2014electric vehicles\u2014acknowledging that Tesla is in for some \u201crough quarters\u201d on that front. Why, then, has the board chosen this moment to present an almost trillion-dollar compensation package to the broader community of shareholders?<\/p>\n
It comes down to what Elon Musk means for the company. In 2025, this board has apparently come to believe that Musk\u2019s presence alone is part of what\u2019s keeping Tesla\u2019s valuation so far above every other car company in the world. It\u2019s the figure of Elon himself, in spite of the wildcat tendencies and fiscal risks imposed therein, that make him worth this world-historic amount of money. Musk, who now owns approximately 13 percent of Tesla, has said publicly that if he can\u2019t increase that stake to \u201c~25\u201d percent, he might just turn his attention elsewhere. With this compensation package, the board (of which he is a member) is proposing to give him just what he asked for: a bid for his attention.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s this perception that Tesla cannot succeed without Elon, that essentially Elon is Tesla, and a lot of the valuation in Tesla is this perception of what he will do with the future,\u201d the investor Ross Gerber, once a prominent Tesla bull, told me. \u201cSo I guess the result was, \u2018Let\u2019s just give him the whole company.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Tesla\u2019s nine-member board\u2014which includes Elon and his brother, Kimbal Musk; an Airbnb co-founder, Joe Gebbia; and the media scion James Murdoch\u2014has echoed that sentiment. \u201cOur singular CEO requires one-of-a-kind compensation that will incentivize him to dedicate his time, energy and considerable talents to Tesla, delivering unprecedented growth for Tesla shareholders,\u201d goes one particularly sycophantic line in a preface to the proposals.<\/p>\n
The reverential posture may have something to do with the board\u2019s own eye-watering compensation packages. In May, The New York Times reported that the board chair, Robyn Denholm, had made more than $530 million by cashing in on Tesla stock during her tenure. (In a recent interview, she called the public fixation on the dollar-value of Musk\u2019s compensation package \u201cmisplaced.\u201d) Her defense speaks to the board\u2019s mindset: \u201cThe people around Elon who can deal with him believe he\u2019s some sort of God,\u201d Gerber said. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of like a religion: If you\u2019re on the Tesla board, you\u2019re like an apostle. And so they buy into all of this.\u201d<\/p>\n
Typically, the boards of publicly traded companies like to minimize risk to shareholders. This is both because it\u2019s the surest path to long-term growth, and because it is illegal not to; if a rogue executive decides to tank the company, that could easily be considered a lapse in the board\u2019s commitment to protecting its shareholders\u2019 best interests. Somehow, Tesla always seems to power through its CEO\u2019s antics, whether a social-media post that leads to a shareholder revolt and a $40 million settlement with regulators or an apparent Nazi salute at a Trump rally. Stunts like these have almost certainly cost the company money and tarnished the brand. But this board appears to believe that Tesla remains Tesla, premium and all, purely because of the perception that Musk just might usher humanity into the future.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s still a chance, however slim, that Musk delivers on that future\u2014the non-Musk directors aren\u2019t totally off base here. If Musk were to somehow fully recommit himself to Tesla, to reorient his private and public life around the project of generating value for his core business, the company might just have a shot at creating astronomical returns. The board is betting on a future where Musk\u2019s innovation and focus are revived. Musk, for his part, still seems to think he\u2019s got what it takes: On Friday, he bought about $1 billion worth of Tesla shares.<\/p>\n
Then again, this is someone who has spent the five days since the assassination of Charlie Kirk amplifying division on X. For good or ill, Tesla\u2019s public image is deeply entwined with Musk, far more than with its cars or its incoming army of humanoid robots. Does that sound like a trillion-dollar idea?<\/p>\n
Related: <\/p>\n
Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:<\/strong><\/p>\n Today\u2019s News<\/strong><\/p>\n Dispatches<\/strong><\/p>\n Explore all of our newsletters here.<\/em><\/p>\n Evening Read<\/strong><\/p>\n Sonja Flemming \/ CBS<\/p>\n Nate Bargatze Had One Joke<\/p>\n By Shirley Li<\/p>\n In the lead-up to last night\u2019s Emmy Awards, the host, Nate Bargatze, explained that he wanted to keep the evening as tightly run as possible, so that the ceremony wouldn\u2019t exceed its three-hour time slot. To enforce order, he intended to rely on a single bit throughout the show: For every second a winner went over their allotted time for giving an acceptance speech, he\u2019d take $1,000 away from a planned $100,000 donation to the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. For every second someone saved, he\u2019d add $1,000 back to the pot. This way, the Emmys would focus solely on celebrating the best of TV, and nothing else. \u201cI need this to be a fun night,\u201d he told Variety. \u201cThere\u2019s enough of the other stuff going on.\u201d<\/p>\n This probably seemed like a good idea on paper: Awards shows notoriously run long, and acceptance speeches tend to cover similar ground; if anything, Bargatze reasoned, \u201call night we will be talking about the Boys & Girls Club.\u201d But in practice, the strategy resulted in speakers rushing through their thank-yous, apologizing to the children representing the organization onstage, and a significantly scripted broadcast.<\/p>\n Read the full article.<\/p>\n More From The Atlantic<\/em><\/p>\n Culture Break<\/p>\n Maggie Shannon for The Atlantic<\/p>\n Read. Adrienne LaFrance explores how Judd Apatow, a kid from Long Island, willed his way to the top of American comedy.<\/p>\n Explore. One Emmys speech captured the Hollywood slog, Paula Mej\u00eda writes.<\/p>\n Play our daily crossword.<\/p>\n Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.<\/p>\n When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting <\/em>The Atlantic.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. For a few precarious hours last week, Elon Musk reportedly lost his title as the world\u2019s richest man. Larry<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21557,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[91,2062,1381,9189],"class_list":{"0":"post-21556","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-elon","9":"tag-money","10":"tag-tesla","11":"tag-thinks"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21556\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n