Some Thoughts on Tesla's Grant of Shares to Musk

TLDR: it’s just as shady as the first one. It’s not a new deal, they revised a deal from 2019 to avoid a shareholder vote. The agreement they used says it was to be for every employee but Elon. They aren’t recognizing the expense on their books until a later date. More fuckery afoot.

The world’s richest man wasn’t fairly compensated for his work folks. We need to incentivize him!! He’s not incentivized!!!

from the smiles it looks like both Ghislaine & Elon thoroughly enjoyed their "kungfu practice"

Still funny to me that Epstein set up Kimbal with a gf. https://www.businessinsider.com/jeffrey-epsteins-ex-girlfriend-dated-kimbal-musk-2020-1

fairly weak stock pop especially on such a green day.

It’s just a couple billion for each percentage of sales decline. Typical CEO agreement

Oh shit, this is just for past work. There is another plan coming for future work to be voted on in November.

except it is 1000x larger than any other CEO agreement.

Thoughts? People need to stop talking about musk and stop buying Tesla's. There's nothing to talk about or much to think about. Not just because musk is a pile of shit but because people need to stop making it ok to funnel their hard earned money to the top 1% who do almost nothing.

While it seems similarly shady as before, I think the grant of shares would be objectively justifiable even by an impartial board. I think Musk is a bad leader in many ways, but in the final analysis, I think if he left Tesla, it could trigger a stock slide that shed $500 billion in market cap in under a week, since there's no conventional basis (e.g. P/E ratio, sales growth) for its trillion-dollar valuation. It's hard to quantify, but a lot seems tied to Musk's cult of personality. He issued a tweet around a week ago saying he was finally going to devote all his time to AI, and while the meaning was cryptic, I took it to mean he was threatening Tesla's board that he'd quit Tesla and focus on xAI if they didn't either give Musk many billions of dollars, or give Musk's xAI many billions of dollars. He seems very aggrieved at his Tesla compensation since 2022, when a Delaware court rescinded his $50ish billion grant, and a Delaware court the same year ordered Musk to follow through on his $44 billion offer to buy Twitter.

Yeah I agree, but I think this is just a punt. That $500B crash is very likely, regardless of what the board does. Their car business is shrinking and unprofitable, their energy credit business is dead, Robotaxi has a steep climb, and Optimus is a ketamine dream. Stroking Elon will give them at least several months to dump shares.

Musk has admitted to visiting Epstein at his NY sex abuse mansion as he was caught going in. Claimed it was only for 30 minutes and blamed it on his wife but regardless he decided to hang out with a notorious convicted child sex trafficker. Not sure if that or using his child as a ballistic helmet whilst he wore a bullet proof vest. Also accusing Trump of being a pedo whilst letting your kid hang out with them is something.

Tesla is irretrievably screwed at this point so future stuff seems barely relevant

Tesla the not car Company. Is there a Robo taxi company that doubles as a cab company. What is footing the bill for all the stuff not the sale of robots or his cab company maybe it’s not the car company

Altogether 27 billion for neglecting the company and actively dragging it down. A remarkably good CEO agreement.

he's going to cash out and run

The company just paid its CEO more than its net profits since inception. Shareholders, this doesn't bode well for you.

I think it's great and Elon deserves 90% of the net income the company has made over the past 3 years. Using profit from the two most recent quarters ($1.7B) he has justly been rewarded a bonus equal to 8 years of profits, assuming the significant downward profit trend is halted. You need to reward excellence guys. /s

Elon got a bigger bonus than NASA’s annual budget. Mostly for lying to pump up the stock price.

You believe piling on enough key person risk should be rewarded. Curious approach.

Is that his bonus for not paying contractors, Tesla is an evil corporation run by a Nazi

Oh is that what this is? I’ve been struggling to find any rationality in either these valuations or Musk’s insane compensation. So you’re saying these investors feel like there’s no way out, so they’ll keep tying Tesla’s share price to Musk’s inflated personality cult/name in order to give them time to dump their shares and walk? Because that actually makes some sense, at least logically. I just have no earthly idea what he does for that company besides tank the share price. I guess there’s also the assumption that Musk’s government ties would help Tesla in legal/potentially illegal ways. Which seems like it would be rather significant, though to what extent those plans continued to play out after Elon got his ass kicked by a 62-year-old Treasury secretary and left Washington *cause they were mean!*—is hard to say. Edit: Sorry if this was laid out in the Substack—I skimmed it, but some of the jargony bits were lost on me.

Not sure why they would avoid a shareholder vote, it seems like a given it will pass (there is probably some amount that would get rejected....maybe over 150 billion?)

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He’ll never leave of his own volition. I don’t think it’s about the money as much as it is his ego.

Yes, situationally, in this unique situation where the key person's continued presence seems responsible for most of the value of a top-ten most valuable company in the world. (By market cap). I can't think of another company at that level that's had such a situation. Even when Steve Jobs lead Apple before his departure, when he was viewed as a vital asset, Apple traded at around 15 times its P/E ratio. Within a day of his resignation, a couple months before his death, Apple stock fell around 7%-8%, demonstrating that the Apple's valuation was tied more to its performance than to its CEO. Tesla, by comparison, is trading around 150-190 times its TTM P/E. It would be irresponsible to cause the loss of $500-$900 billion in market share because you wouldn't pay the CEO a *potential* $30 billion bonus in stock options (tied to stock performance) every couple years.

"""It would be irresponsible to cause the loss of $500-$900 billion in market share because you wouldn't pay the CEO a *potential* $30 billion bonus in stock options (tied to stock performance) every couple years.""" I think it's pretty fair to argue that the irresponsibility happened when a single person was allowed to become that indispensable to a company's valuation and the board doesn't do everything in their power to defuse the situation. Because unless Musk is a real life Tony Stark, which he emphatically is not, it means that the board is actually trying to convince people to buy stock in a ticking time bomb.

That’s kinda always been his job, no?

Elon hurt the Tesla brand more than anything else. Why would you award that. The board should do whats best for the company. Most likely best thing they could do is getting other CEO.

Have you done the math on this? It is fucking insane. Even a cheap, outdated, plastic car loving Stan must see that!

This is just a plan to secure Musks total control over Tesla. Which he needs to set in motion his own plan of Tesla buying XAi to get rid if his Twitter debt and avoid bankruptcy for the flailing AI-Company. In every normal world, the Company Board would have fired a CEO who tarnished the brands image like Musk has done with Tesla long ago.

I'm shocked, Musk is a liability, sales have slumped massively since he went Fascist with Trump. Your not supposed to reward you CEO for bad performance. Shareholders are either crazy to support this, or are being out muscled by the big shareholders at the top of the food chain. Either way its another massive red flag. Tesla is going down the drain.

I would argue against your stock slide theory of him leaving but the more he degrades the brand the higher the stock price goes. It’s almost as if the company’s sole purpose is a controlled crash landing.

You responded on realtesla.

Musk still has most of his wealth tied up in Tesla stock. If it went under it would tank his net worth. Another reason this whole incentive makes no sense.

it would need to pass unanimously is my understanding, in this particular case - Montana Skeptic posted about it when it was first up in Delaware court last year

Oh okay, I will have to check that out

Reprehensible racist shit-heel makes another $Billion. Sounds about right.

People *have* stopped buying Teslas. Their sales in Europe are down over 50% (over 70% in some specific countries), the Cybertruck is officially a dud with \~25k expected deliveries this year (vs 250k projected). But TSLA is a meme stock, so it literally does not matter.

Wasted 21 Billion of taxpayer money via Doge, gets rewarded with $29 billion in stock. JFC.

He’s really good at it. Exhibit A - Market Cap vs actual earnings

Do you know when they are going to vote on investing in xAI?

All grift to be voted on in November.

I agree but I don't understand how Musk got this cult of personality to begin with, he's not charismatic at all

I picture little Leon pouting in a corner until he gets his extra billions.

The world is falling apart and the future is bleak. People want to believe that some magical technology will usher in a golden age of prosperity. The dumbest of the Technoking's followers really think that Tesla will crack general AI and put a robot in every house. A robot that can cook and clean and walk the dog and then spend all night driving a cab or day trading to earn them money while they sleep (or have sex with another robot).

yeah it's classified as a gift i think is the term he used, if it's a new deal for previous work, that satisfies the requirements of the court - in this case namely the completely captured board. Which of course Tesla can't do because no sane board would approve it. And they can hardly draw up a forward-looking agreement for the same amount of money because the growth story is over. The current board would still rubber stamp it of course, and I know they've got that thing in place now where shareholders need to have a certain amount in order to sue but I think giving Musk 90 billion dollars and total control of the company at this point in its history (crashing and burning in fast forward) might be more than the institutional investors are willing to swallow. One way or another it's going to be bouncing around in the court system and most likely still not resolved when the company hits the warp speed part of terminal decline. My prediction is that, there are internal projections showing just how fucked the company is and the rapid one way trajectory it's on, Elon and the board are desperately trying to wring as much blood out of this stone as they can before discovery makes it public because the moment it is, it's all over bar the mass selling of shares creating the self fulfilling prophecy

eh, it kinda matters. reminds me of the dot com bubble. websites worth hundreds of millions, but when people realized they were worthless, they died and are mostly forgotten. not sure where elon will stand when that happens, but i know his car wont be standing at all

It’s sad that you need to flag that as sarcasm because there are so many people who seriously say similar things.