Tesla has proposed a massive $1 trillion compensation package for CEO Elon Musk, and many of the benchmarks he needs to hit are simply watered-down versions of the promises he spent years on the company.
It revealed the proposed pay package, not a photo of Tesla’s board depicting the company’s annual power of attorney. Instead, the board focuses on plans to set up “the most valuable company in history.”
Certainly, if Tesla achieves everything it aims in this agreement, it looks like a rather different company at the end of the decade it covers. It does not change the fact that the milestones the company is hoping to aim for masks are less ambitious than his own previously stated goals.
The unprecedented pay package still needs to be approved by shareholders at its November meeting, but it’s easy for the company’s passionate fan base to vote “yes.” Previous votes on mask compensation have been overwhelmingly approved by Tesla shareholders.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at what masks need to achieve to receive the full payment.
20 million cars… Total
Musk spent years claiming that Tesla could build 20 million electric vehicles a year by 2030. This was when he and his company were committed to growing at a 50% rate each year.
However, Tesla moved away from these promises and turned it back in 2024 as sales growth stagnated. The company then pulled a target of 20 million people a year from last year’s Impact Report and stopped construction of a planned plant in Mexico that would increase production.
TechCrunch Events
San Francisco
|
October 27th-29th, 2025
Now, the first “product goal” that Tesla’s board laid out to achieve his path to masks becoming a sign is to deliver a total of 20 million vehicles. Tesla has already sold 8 million cars so far, and despite its sluggish sales, it is still shy about 2 million a year.
With the new pay package laid out for 10 years, the goal means that by 2030 it would have been from 20 million EVs per year to just 20 million EVs by 2035.
1 million robotaxis*
One of Musk’s most infamous and outrageous promises about Tesla came in 2019 when the company claimed it had 1 million Robotaxis in 2020. It is now 2025, and Tesla has just launched its Robotakshi service in Austin, Texas.
To access the proposed full-price package, Tesla is asking the mask to help the company realize a modified version of its promise, as it is to have “1 million Robotaxis in commercial operations” as it lists another product target.
That’s a warning goal. The fine print shows that Tesla requires that the “average daily total total” of one million Robotaxis “average daily total” is “commercially operated.” [Tesla] Three months in a row as part of the transportation service. ”
Tesla continues to define “Robotaxi” as Tesla vehicles, including, but not limited to, dedicated “cybercabs” in development.
This includes vehicles owned by the customer. This is another thing that masks have long promised, but never delivered. He has spent years claiming that Tesla could turn digital switches over to turn existing vehicles into completely autonomous vehicles, and that owners could add those vehicles and subtract them freely into a larger Robotax fleet.
But Musk has since said many of the Teslas currently on the streets don’t have the hardware needed for the former to happen, and the company has yet to demonstrate the latter. Anyway, Musk now has an even timeline to try and achieve both things.
A million “bots”?
Musk believes that Tesla’s future is about an developing humanoid robot called Optimus. Just this week he insisted that it could compensate for 80% of the company’s future revenues.
As he became more and more focused on Optimus, Musk made some rather wild promises about what that future would look like. One of his core claims was that Tesla would create a Optimus Bot for 1 million per year in 2029.
Still, Tesla’s board is simply asking masks to provide a total of one million “bots” as part of this proposed compensation plan. Tesla also defines “bots” as “a robot or other physical product with mobility using artificial intelligence manufactured on or on behalf of the company,” but the company’s vehicles are not counted.
The director appears to agree that Optimus “can be a Tesla bestseller product,” and says he recites “the clearest example of Tesla’s ability to benefit all humanity.”
However, the board also notes that Optimus’s “commercialization plan” is “still under development” and Musk should reach the 1 million mark until 2035.
Everything else
The fourth and final product goal that Musk must achieve is to note 10 million active subscriptions into Tesla’s fully automated driving (FSD) software. It is definitely the most ambitious product goal. The company has not stated how many times the current owners have paid FSD, but executives have recently said that adoption rates are in “teens.” At best, that means hundreds of thousands to millions of low Tesla vehicles have installed the software.
All other Tesla boards are asking for masks. Ultimately, Musk needs to help Tesla reach a $8.5 trillion valuation to unlock the full value of the compensation package and become the indication itself.
The mask already had a spectacular design to accomplish something similar. He often argues that Tesla is more valuable than one day Apple and Saudi Aramco combined. At current valuation, both companies are collectively worth around $5.5 trillion. But earlier this year, the CEO insisted that Tesla is more valuable than the next five most valuable companies combined:
Musk, which aims to blow up Tesla’s valuation, is being asked to increase the company’s revenue essentially to $400 billion compared to its revenue of around $17 billion last year.
Finally, Tesla’s board sought two prominent assurances from the mask to unlock the full value of the compensation package. One is that he has to work with the company to develop a plan for how he will succeed as Tesla CEO (and this plan essentially locks him into the company for at least 7.5 years).
The other thing buried in the footnote is that Tesla has received “guarantee that Mask’s involvement in the political realm will end in a timely manner.”
Overall, this is a complicated agreement with many truly pie in the ski ideas about where Tesla can go under mask leadership over the next decade. The same was said about the previous compensation agreement that hit Tesla’s mask in 2018, but the company still attacked all of those seemingly city-by-city targets. (The Musk Award was eventually dusted by the Delaware Chance Court.)
Still, it’s hard not to realize how much these new goals are coming from companies that are trying to bring CEO promises back to Earth.
Source link
