Tesla CEO Compensation During the 2022 Investor Call: Why the Board of Directors hasn’t Come up for a New Long-Term Pay Package?

Musk was last asked about the possibility of a new long-term pay package in the April 2022 Tesla investor call, and dismissed it with the comment, “There are no discussions currently underway for incremental compensation for me.”

Musk has a unique management style. He leads several ventures outside of Tesla: the aerospace company SpaceX; his tunneling venture The Boring Co.; a brain interface startup, Neuralink; and Twitter. It’s uncommon for executives to hold multiple CEO titles.

Tesla is holding an investors day on March 1, and will soon be releasing its proxy statement to shareholders announcing its plans for an annual meeting. Tesla’s board could announce its plans for a new compensation package at either of those events — if such a package is coming.

In 2021, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy received a compensation of $212.7 million. Apple CEO Tim Cook received nearly $100 million last year. It was found that Microsoft CEO had a salary of $50 million in 2011.

Tesla’s board of directors have claimed that it created the plan “after more than six months of careful analysis with a leading independent compensation consultant as well as discussions with Elon.”

The compensation plan was unnecessary due to Musk having a large stake in the company, according to the original complaint by Tornetta.

The lawsuit was certified as a class action case by the court in January 2021. The case has taken years to move through the system due to the drawn-out nature of litigation, including working through a motion from Tesla to dismiss the complaint.

The advisory firms Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis recommended in the last year that the Tesla stockholders do not accept the compensation plan.

“Given that that entire board is very much under the influence of Musk it’s hard to know that anything that they did would be following proper process,” she said.

Keeping Twitter alive: How Musk came to the Delaware Court of Chancery to test in a case against SolarCity by Tesla

The trial is expected to last a week. Chancery court judges at times rule from the bench, but that’s uncommon. It may take weeks to months before a decision is issued.

Musk has become something of a regular at the Delaware Court of Chancery. A trial was close to going to trial last month. He testified in a lawsuit about the acquisition of SolarCity byTesla. A judge ruled in Musk’s favor.

While Musk fired off some tweets Monday evening, posting statistics on Twitter usage during the epic World Cup final and retweeting posts from his Tesla

            (TSLA) and SpaceX companies, it remains unclear if he will actually step down from his post at Twitter after vowing to “abide” by the results of the poll. By his own admission, there isn’t someone readily available to run the perilous platform. In one Sunday night tweet, Musk wrote, “No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no replacement.

The move came after mounting criticism of his chaotic leadership at Twitter, including recent decisions to suspend journalists and introduce (and then delete) a controversial policy banning the practice of linking out to rival platforms; laying off half of the company’s staff; firing others who disagreed with him; and welcoming back onto the platform previously banned figures who trafficked in misinformation, conspiracy theories, and hate speech.

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The Elephant in the Room: Musk is the Lifeblood of Tesla and the Second-richest Person on the Planet, according to Wedbush Securities

Given Musk’s propensity for tweeting, and his rapid decisions after previous polls, many expected he would have addressed the elephant in the room by now. But he has not. In fact, Musk spent most of Monday conspicuously quiet, refraining from tweeting for a remarkable 18-hour period.

Some investors are worried about Tesla losing Musk. At last year’s annual shareholders meeting, one raised the question of succession, prompting Musk to say, “I intend to stay with Tesla as long as I can be useful.”

Rusch thinks that Musk has caused a brand public backlash that could negatively affect the company’s image.

Many people think that free speech is at risk and that’s why we think banning journalists without consistent defensible standards or clear communication is too much for most consumers.

Daniel Ives, tech analyst at Wedbush Securities said he expects a monster package for Musk. “I think Musk is the lifeblood of Tesla. He is a big part of the stock premium.

He became one of the richest people on the planet through lucrative packages of stock options that gave him the right to buy hundreds of millions of shares of stock for a fraction of their market price, if the company hit various financial and market value targets.

The package of options he was granted in 2012 expired last year after he had received 9 of 10 blocks of potential options. And last month the company disclosed Musk received the last remaining block of options granted under an even more lucrative 2018 pay package.

He does not need anyone’s help to pay his bills. After all, he is the second-richest person on the planet, according to a real-time estimate by Forbes, behind only Bernard Arnault, head of the luxury brand empire LVMH. Musk has a net worth that is close to $198 billion and that money is enough to make him overpay for the micro-blogging site.

And the better Tesla does under his leadership, the more he’s worth. He owns 412 million shares of Tesla stock outright, and holds options to purchase another 304 million at a bargain-basement price of $23.34 a share. Friday was the day that the stock closed at $208.25.

He said the board should send a signal that Musk is going to be in charge for a long time.

We have a very capable team here. So I think Tesla would continue to do very well even if I was kidnapped by aliens or went back to my home planet,” he said, before adding, “So I’m not leaving, just to be clear.”

In the federal court case last November, board member James Murdoch testified that Musk has settled on an individual to be his successor, but did not reveal that person’s identity.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, for example, both took large stakes in their companies as founders, but neither has received stock grants or options since those companies had initial public offerings in 1997 and 2012, respectively.

They have not earned much in the way of salary. As CEO, Bezos made an average of $81,000 a year and in the last ten years he has been paid $1 a year.

Bezos gave up the CEO job at Amazon July 2021, at the age of 57, and remains executive chairman of the company. But with a net worth estimated at about $213 billion at that time, it’s not clear that any pay package would have kept him on the job.