Musk’s Money

Elon Musk is putting his money where his mouth is. In a securities filing on Friday, Tesla  disclosed a new stock award for its CEO worth as much as $1 trillion. It hinges entirely on Musk’s ambitious claims that his focus on humanoid robots and robotaxis will turn Tesla into “the most valuable company in the world by far,” as he has often said. It’s not crazy to imagine Tesla passing everyone else, although it has some ways to go: Its current market capitalization of $1.1 trillion compares with market leader Nvidia’s value of $4 trillion. 

Musk has also suggested Tesla might become as “valuable as the next five companies combined,” but that’s not a goal he seems willing to commit to. The top five companies are now worth $16.6 trillion. The new stock award doesn’t require him to get Tesla’s market cap that high. He just—just!—has to get Tesla to an $8.5 trillion market capitalization within a decade to have a chance of collecting all the shares in the award. And what an award—he stands to get as many as 423.7 million shares, or 12% of Tesla’s share count, which is roughly equivalent to the stake he already owns (that’s excluding the shares granted him by the earlier big stock award from 2018 that is still being litigated). The shares in the latest award are worth $143 billion at Tesla’s current market price. Given the market cap goals Tesla has set, though, they’d be worth nearly eight times as much if he collected all of them.