I'd love to hear from anyone at all who can give me a reason why the shareholders would vote for this. The stock value has been going down for both the 1 year and 3 year time frames, so he's not doing great things today. The company only made a profit of $18B last year, so this is like wiping out 3 years of profitability in one step. This package is over half of the company's total revenue!! In what world do investors think it's a good idea to say one guy deserves almost as much as the entire company brings in for a year?
I'll wait for the financial analysts that I both trust, and I know hate Musk, before I have any confidence in answering that question.
But... my best uninformed guess is that it's less fanboy worship, and more fear that Musk is the only thing propping up the insane stock valuation.
I'm assuming that Musk has a complex web of possibly illegal and highly engineered financial instruments that keep that stock pumping, or at least, not crashing - yet.
Maybe those who voted to approve might be aware, or involved, in that house of cards and believe removing Musk would be akin to blowing on it.
But I'm just pulling all of this out of my ass, so who knows...
It might be as simple as the majority of Tesla shareholders who voted to approve, including the institutional ones, are really just submental morons.
As the holder of roughly $45 worth of Tesla stock, I voted against his pay package and every other shady, bullshit proposal on the ballot. My vote counted for almost nothing and I’d probably be considered an “activist shareholder” anyway, but it was worth the money I’ve lost to get to click that button anyway.
Sustainability doesn't matter. Musk's hype holds the market value up (in the short term), and kicking him out could tank it from the controversy alone. That's all that matters.
I like to think many investors are buy and hold, long term institutional, Warren acolytes or whatever, but in reality the outlook is just so short for so many people now. What matters is the next day and the next quarter, and they can just bail out after that.
Imagine if they had instead hired 500,000 people on $100,000 each. They could have bought the entire city of Detroit and had it making Teslas, instead they've got one coked up narcissist.
I don’t think so. I think it’s a one-time compensation package at present, but I could be wrong.
I don’t understand it because that money could go to the actual people doing the actual work — and I’m quite sure they deserve it and could use it far more than Musk.
They have a huge head start. And their battery tech is top notch even if the rest of the vehicle is poorly build.
I'd personally never buy one either, for multiple reasons, but most people don't care/know about the shitty build quality, the shitty ai and the scummy locking features down remotely when you sell the car.
Is the battery tech that good though? Genuinely don’t know.
Seems other manufacturers have a huge head start in every other area of manufacturing cars and even if they still lag behind on battery tech, it won’t be long before they catch up on this one metric, whereas Tesla would have to catch up on every other metric.
There's a big difference between the market capitalization and book value. Tesla's stock is probably way overvalued but I can't say for sure since I don't own any of their stock and haven't looked into their financials.
They have the premier charging network in the United States.
Unfortunately, nothing else comes close and probably won't for a few years... Like 10 years at least. The US is probably a decade behind Europe's electrification at this point, and about 75 years behind it's rail electrification.
I've never even seen a Tesla Supercharger in the same state they build these things in, other than around the plant in Fremont when I worked there. Plenty of non-Tesla ones, though.
Tesla "shareholders" clearly don't have the interests of their company in mind if they're approving a 56 billion dollar compensation package for their "CEO."
And also...do the "shareholders" think this will improve the value of the company? Isn't it more than half of their revenue? Wouldn't this actually be a really bad thing for Tesla's value? Isn't Tesla one of the few EV producers with quickly dropping sales figures? Are the shareholders actually just Mlon Eusk? Enquiring minds want to know!
Those idiots decided to throw away their money to a grifter, who are we to judge? Let them drive the company to the ground, plenty of EV producers actually making good cars.
I mean, this is actually probably the "right" decision from a shareholder perspective.
Delaware is still going to stop that bribe any time soon. But this way the stock won't tank when musk guts the company out of spite and they can sell off their shares over the next few weeks/months.
Horrible for the company but... that company was already fucked.
I can only assume they are somehow expecting a cut or kickback from this, I can't think of anything he's done in the last 10 years that was actually good for the company. You have to live under a rock, or more accurately in an echo chamber, to believe someone like this is good for the profitability of a company, let alone deserves that many zeros.
Actually speculation is that twitter and general poor decision making may be overextending him.
He still has more "worth" than any of us can ever dream of. But he doesn't have the liquidity to do anything with it. And considering the strong indications that it is the Saudis and possibly the Russians who bankrolled a lot of the twitter shit...
A good way to think about it is this: Your friend from college who actually managed to buy a house a couple years back? They have more "money" than most people you know. But, unless they are willing to sell that house, they can't do anything with it. So they are still living based on their paychecks and savings in the bank.
While some investors remained silent on their voting position, Tesla's largest shareholders, including Vanguard Group, BlackRock, and State Street, collectively holding roughly 17% of Tesla's stock, abstained from public comment. The full voting breakdown will be revealed during a Tesla shareholder meeting in Austin.
One, what an AI-written paragraph: "While some ... remained silent ... [others] abstained from public comment." Aren't those the same thing?
Two, this is all just a bunch of rich motherfuckers deciding how much of an insane amount of wealth to give to one of them. Where'd they get that money? Customers.
Imagine how competitive an electric car company could be if it wasn't just a front for shuffling vast sums of money around between people who already have more money than they could ever spend.
One, what an AI-written paragraph: "While some ... remained silent ... [others] abstained from public comment." Aren't those the same thing?
Yes, but it works. The emphasis is that all of the richest were silent instead of just some, which was the case for the rest of the shareholders. We hate repeating words in general English (which is why we have such a ridiculous amount of vocabulary), so “silent” was replaced the second time.
Still awkwardly worded, though, so you might be right with the AI thing.
It depends if "public comment" is akin to going on the record. Then staying silent means they didn't say anything, and not making a public comment means they said something to us that we promised not to make public.
Saying something not on the record is actually pretty common. And is most of what private sources are about and for. They might be able to point a reporter to someone or something that would be able to be reported on. Trust is a super important difference between an established reporter and a new reporter.