The only possible justification for this is that it's in stock, so it'll be worthless when he tanks the company. Worse than worthless, because he'll have borrowed billions against it.
— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec.bsky.social) November 6, 2025 at 5:29 PM
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In retrospect it seems obvious that the only reason anyone would even want a trillion dollars in personal wealth is because their only goal is to live forever in their Martian Gooncave.
institutional investors really need to start planning to divest from this company, if the consumer rubes want to pay him a trillion dollars to keep driving the company into the ground, let them drown
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) November 6, 2025 at 5:10 PM
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"We're not a car company, we're an AI company" is pretty much what you would expect a car company that sucks would say.
— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec.bsky.social) November 6, 2025 at 5:36 PM
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the great thing about Musk's comp package being heavily incentive-gated is that it guarantees a decade of systemic financial fraud at the heart of the market. good job everyone
— post malone ergo propter malone (@proptermalone.bsky.social) November 6, 2025 at 6:23 PM
do I think that Musk has considered hyperinflating the dollar so that he gets paid? obviously. *obviously* he has thought about this.
— post malone ergo propter malone (@proptermalone.bsky.social) November 6, 2025 at 6:44 PM
I don't think they inflation indexed it either so, you know, there's another pathway open
— post malone ergo propter malone (@proptermalone.bsky.social) November 6, 2025 at 6:39 PM
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Ok, but Tesla is currently at 7.2 million sales in 9 years, sales have slowed down and to make the first step towards his trillion dollar salary he needs to sell 20 million cars. I don’t think any of this is going to happen.
— Twlldun (@twlldun.bsky.social) November 6, 2025 at 5:44 PM
He is also not going to deliver one million robots because at present he has not delivered one (1) robot because his robots are not real.
— Twlldun (@twlldun.bsky.social) November 6, 2025 at 5:46 PM
Still, I’m glad this brain genius is going to land the first permanent settlement on Mars*
*he isn’t— Twlldun (@twlldun.bsky.social) November 6, 2025 at 5:50 PM
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This is true (and the WSJ breakdown is great) but I can’t stress enough how low a bar some of the milestones are compared to what Musk touted over the years.
He used to say Tesla would make 20M cars *per year by 2030*. Now he only needs to sell 20M by 2035 — and Tesla has already sold 8M!— Sean O’Kane (@seanokane.bsky.social) November 7, 2025 at 8:05 PM
Anyway I wrote about this 2 months ago
techcrunch.com/2025/09/06/m…— Sean O’Kane (@seanokane.bsky.social) November 7, 2025 at 8:10 PM
… Everything else Tesla’s board is asking of Musk is tied to money. Ultimately, Musk needs to help Tesla reach an $8.5 trillion valuation in order to unlock the full value of the compensation package and become a trillionaire himself.
Musk already had grand designs to accomplish something similar. He has often claimed that Tesla could one day become more valuable than Apple and Saudi Aramco combined. At their current valuations, those two companies are collectively worth around $5.5 trillion. But earlier this year, the CEO claimed Tesla could be worth more than the next five most-valuable companies combined — which at the time meant he was aiming closer to the $15 trillion mark.
Along with the goal of blowing up Tesla’s valuation, Musk is being asked to increase the company’s earnings to, essentially, $400 billion per year — an enormous figure compared to last year’s earnings of around $17 billion.
Lastly, Tesla’s board has asked for two notable assurances from Musk in order to unlock the full value of the compensation package. One is that he must work with the company to develop a plan for how he will be succeeded as CEO of Tesla (and the plan essentially locks him to the company for at least 7.5 years).
The other, buried in a footnote, is that Tesla received “assurances that Musk’s involvement with the political sphere would wind down in a timely manner.” …
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Getting a billion dollars sounds really hard until you find out that all you have to do is impress a bunch of Tesla shareholders
— Ian Boudreau (@ianboudreau.com) November 7, 2025 at 12:44 PM
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Musk’s face at the end of this clip, as he says “… But he is… charismatic.”
best part of this is how elon musk's definition of "swindler" is also the most concise possible summary of how he became a billionaire
— e.w. niedermeyer (@niedermeyer.online) November 6, 2025 at 3:06 PM
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It would be a lot funnier, if not for the damage Musk has already done.
As Elon Musk wins trillion dollar payday. The greed is biblical.
— Greg Olear (@gregolear.bsky.social) November 7, 2025 at 7:42 AM
Atul Gawande, for the New Yorker:
It was January, my final week in the outgoing Administration. In a few days, Donald Trump would be inaugurated as President. I had come to the United States Agency for International Development in early 2022, leaving my surgery practice and public-health research in Boston to lead the agency’s global-health efforts. Now I’d be returning to my previous life.
I spent my last days at U.S.A.I.D. in meetings with our civil- and foreign-service leaders, thanking them. Their work with partner countries had helped to contain twenty-one outbreaks of deadly disease, sustain Ukraine’s health system after Russia’s invasion, combat H.I.V., tuberculosis, and polio, and reduce maternal and child deaths worldwide. On a budget of just twenty-four dollars per American—out of the fifteen thousand dollars in taxes paid per person last year—they had saved lives at an almost unimaginable scale. An independent, peer-reviewed analysis in The Lancet estimated that U.S.A.I.D. assistance had saved ninety-two million lives over two decades.
Many of the leaders voiced trepidation about what the incoming Administration might bring, but I struck a sanguine note. U.S.A.I.D., I pointed out, had more than sixty years of solid bipartisan backing. Trump had advanced significant parts of the agency’s work in his first term. He had personally pledged to end H.I.V. as a public-health threat by 2030. The incoming Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, had been a vocal supporter of the bureau. There would be isolated partisan skirmishes—over diversity initiatives, abortion-related policies, and the like—but more than ninety-five per cent of our bureau’s work had never been under contention.
Clearly, I lacked imagination. Within hours of being sworn in, President Trump signed an executive order for a “pause” to all foreign assistance. Secretary Rubio sent a cable suspending every program outright. No program staff could be paid. No services could be delivered. Medicines and food already on the shelves could not be used. No warning had been given to the governments that relied on them. It was immediately obvious that hundreds of thousands of people would die in the first year alone. But the Administration did not reconsider; it escalated. Elon Musk exulted in swinging his chainsaw. Within weeks and in defiance of legal mandates, he and Rubio purged U.S.A.I.D.’s staff, terminated more than four-fifths of its contracts, impounded its funds, and dismantled the agency. Neither Congress nor the Supreme Court did anything to stop it.
We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed “public man-made death,” which, he observed, has been perhaps the most overlooked cause of mortality in the last century. Brooke Nichols, the Boston University epidemiologist and mathematical modeller, has maintained a respected tracker of current impact. The model is conservative, assuming, for example, that the State Department will fully sustain the programs that remain. As of November 5th, it estimated that U.S.A.I.D.’s dismantling has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children…
War for Ukraine Day 1,352: Once Again Russian Missiles and Drones Are Striking Ukrainian Civilian Targets In the Small Hours of the Night
Aziz, light!
As has been noted, Tesla is a meme stock, its insanely overvalued price propelled by Elmo’s cult followers. Without him the bubble could burst, the board reasoned. So they met his demands.
It is devoutly to be wished that the company fail in due time, so that Musk will get at least some of his comeuppance.
In the meantime he is alarmed to be losing his grip on his NASA golden goose.
Shalimar
Meh. The number is obviously bullshit. What the stockholders have done is engaged Musk to lead the rest of their game of mutually assured chicken. The stock price is absurdly inflated. Revenue will never rise enough to make it worth what it is now, and Musk has proven he isn’t capable of leading that revenue increase.
It is only a matter of who gets out at whatever the extreme of the bubble turns out to be and who loses all of their money in the end. Musk himself would have been better off if they had turned him down and he had walked away now after selling 25% of his stock at current valuations.
Shalimar
@Aziz, light!: With him the bubble is still going to burst, because he has not shown an ability to create revenue outside of electric car buying liberals who have already turned on him for his racism/politics.
Shalimar
I don’t think any of the AI companies will produce revenues in the next decade to justify the massive resources they are putting into it. That leaves Musk with 2 paths to his trillion: self-driving cars that are independent and competent on a level that experts say is not going to happen in the next 10-15 years if ever. And humanoid robots (I still don’t get why the robots have to look like people when it would be a lot easier to produce them for the tasks they need to do) with working hands, which no one has figured out yet and might not be possible in the next 10-15 years. There is no reason to expect Musk’s engineers will be the ones who figure out these massive problems just because he is throwing the most money at them.
eclare
I just can’t. There is is a car in my driveway, it runs. The air runs. It is fine. Why do I buy something else?
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Shalimar: In SF there are self-driving Waymo taxis everywhere, but apparently Elon cannot figure out how to have Teslas be reliable and safe self-driving LOL.
Ramalama
The one time I rode in a Tesla was the last time. What a POS that thing was. I could not open the door. The back seat was scandalously uncomfortable. Like whoever built it clearly had never padded a seat before. It felt like the car would slip off the side of the road the whole trip to the airport. I live in the mountains but Quebec does a superb job, best in the world maybe, of keeping the roads clear and safe. It was wasn’t even snowing. It wasn’t even the driver …it felt like car never got a grip, ready to be blown off to the side if a crow flew too close and sneezed nearby.
Ugh, these people in my universe. Go away !
p.a.
Perhaps Tesla investors should seek out Enron and that blood-test-thingy investors; give those folks a call, see if those people could talk some sense into them.
Maybe they’re the same people?🙄
JoyceH
@Shalimar: Robots need to look like humans because that’s how Asimov did it. I swear, I can’t get over how naive most investors are – they consider Musk such an amazing Visionary when anyone who read science fiction as a teenager immediately recognizes that he’s a guy who read science fiction as a teenager. Most of his brilliant ideas are plagiarized from ‘60s era sci-fi.
Barney
It’s surprising that the reports about “one trillion dollars!!!” (insert pinky) don’t mention much that the Telsa stock price dropped 7% from the start of Thursday to the end of Friday, as this wheeze became apparent and sank in.
Ten Bears
It’s all just ones and zeros on a computer somewhere. When the power goes out, won’t be
Paul
All human suffering is at some level a choice.
Other first-world countries are making great strides addressing homelessness, hunger, poverty.
We have the means. We choose not to help.
Princess
I guess it does serve to inflation-proof Musk’s salary.
Meanwhile Microsoft lost 12 billion on ai last quarter according to the WSJ.
Expletive Deleted
@JoyceH: Also because they do nothing useful or new. Musk’s personal brand is promising “the future”, so the robots either need to be androids or intelligent to fit the narrative – “grok” covers the second part I guess.
Nanites would have been an option I guess, but those are hard to show off at a press conference.
Shalimar
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): My limited understanding is the Waymo taxis are not the same as fully self’driving vehicles with no human oversight. They do have human supervisors able to intervene when there is an inevitable problem.
That does underline the other problem Tesla has though. Musk thought lidar was too expensive to scale up to millions of vehicles like he wanted, so he scrapped it. Which means his vehicles will be cheaper but less safe. Literally every other self-driving vehicle that exists will be statiscally safer.
different-church-lady
If giving Musk a trillion dollars is what it takes to get him the fuck away from our government, then I say it’s worth it.
Glidwrith
Two things:
What is Ebitda?
Because banks are so stupid/corrupt when it comes to these billionaire swindlers, why wouldn’t they lend this mass murderer money based on his compensation package?
In other words, he doesn’t need to meet those goals, just persuade a bank to use it as collateral.
RevRick
Over a decade ago, Rob Nixon, in his book on environmental justice related to climate change, coined the phrase “slow violence.” He said it happens “gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.”
Trump, Rubio, and Musk have unleashed a not-so-slow violence of dying from disease and starvation. The cessation of USAID, born of malevolent neglect, has brought the kind of violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. It is just something bad that happens naturally. So, we are told to see it as merely unfortunate , and therefore, since it’s far away, we meet it with a collective shrug. Which makes us complicit, even though none of us wants to be.
RevRick
You would have to make $2,283/hour every hour, seven days a week, to earn $1 billion in 50 years. To make a trillion dollars over that time frame, you would need to $2,283,000/hour.
kindness
My humble thoughts are that that $1T figure is vaporware. I mean a whole bunch of that figure is the stocks Elon owns in his companies. And with all due respect, take Tesla as an example. It is so over-valued compared to other automaker stock prices. It’s fiction. It’s been pumped up and held up just like crypto is, on stock owners wishes, hopes and beliefs.
JetsamPool
And the implementation of those ideas is plagiarized from 1980s sci-fi.
artem1s
Mutual fund advisors have been moving away from Telsa for awhile now. Also pension funds. I think it was Denmark’s pensions dumped all their Tesla earlier this year. It’s not going to stop, that for sure. the only way he can make those sales benchmarks is if he gets some sort of major rental company or government contract. I don’t see Hertz or Enterprise taking that kind of liability risk if killing their customers. So DoD contract?
Chris T.
@Glidwrith:
It stands for “Earnings Before I Trick Dumb Auditors”.
(Actually it’s earnings before “Interest, Taxes, Deductions and Allowances” but the joke version, told around the Enron shares trading desks, is more accurate in practice. It’s an easily gamed measure of how much money a company is making.)
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
Wrong thread. Maybe.
Boris Rasputin (The Evil Twin)
One trillion divided by 600,000 is…
a crime against humanity, and the numbers will only get worse.
Yutsano
Didn’t our esteemed Professor Tom Levenson write a book about this?
JustMusing
My 1972 Datsun 510 restoration is way better than any of the Tesla cars. Especially the twice over ugly cyber truck. Send them all to a recycling center with Musk going first. Ok
WaterGirl
@JustMusing: Just saw your comment now. The first comment has to be manually approved, which I just did. After that your comments will show up for everyone right away.