Tesla shareholders voted Thursday to restore CEO Elon Musk’s record $44.9 billion pay package that was thrown out by a Delaware judge earlier this year, sending a strong vote of confidence in his leadership of the electric vehicle maker.
The favorable vote doesn’t necessarily mean that Musk will get the all-stock compensation anytime soon. The package is likely to remain tied up in the Delaware Chancery Court and Supreme Court for months as Tesla tries to overturn the Delaware judge’s rejection.
Musk has raised doubts about his future with Tesla this year, writing on X, the social media platform he owns, that he wanted a 25% stake in the company in order to stop him from taking artificial intelligence development elsewhere. The higher stake is needed to control the use of AI, he has said.
And giving a giant payday is very likely to inspire him to look for new things to buy. That’s a full Twitter in bonus shares and I think Musk looks at his vast paper wealth and tends to always want a new project rather than for the numbers to just steadily go up.
Making a bad bet on Twitter which actually left him meaningfully poorer meant he’d be more likely to devote time to Tesla. Giving him a bunch of money to burn a hole in his pocket makes him more likely to try something else because it’s effectively free.
Do you really want him devoting more time to Tesla, though? His best-performing company is SpaceX, which is largely because he leaves it the fuck alone, for the most part.
Why wait for the numbers to steadily go up when you can pump-and-dump and get away with it? Which he does and does.