Musk’s $1T pay package is full of watered-down versions of his own broken promises

Tesla has proposed a massive new $1 trillion compensation package for its CEO Elon Musk, and many of the benchmarks he needs to hit are simply watered-down versions of promises he’s spent years making about the company.

That’s not the picture Tesla’s board of directors paints in the company’s annual proxy statement, where they revealed the proposed pay package. Instead, the board focuses on how it plans to create “the most valuable company in history.”

To be sure, if Tesla accomplishes all that it aims for with this deal, it will look like a much different company at the end of the 10-year period it covers. That doesn’t change the fact that the milestones the company is asking Musk to aim for are less ambitious than his own previously-stated goals.

While the unprecedented pay package still needs to be approved by shareholders at a meeting in November, it’s easy to see the company’s fervent fan base voting “yes.” Previous votes on Musk’s compensation have been overwhelmingly approved by Tesla’s shareholders.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at what Musk needs to accomplish in order to receive the full payout.

20 million cars … total

Musk spent years claiming Tesla would be able to make 20 million electric vehicles per year by 2030. This was back when he and his company were still promising to grow at a rate of 50% each year.

But Tesla walked away from those promises as sales growth stalled, and then reversed in 2024. The company then pulled the 20-million-per-year goal from its impact report last year, and stopped building a planned factory in Mexico that would have increased production.

Now, the first “product goal” that Tesla’s board of directors laid out for Musk to achieve on his path to becoming a trillionaire is to deliver 20 million vehicles total. Tesla has already sold eight million cars to date, and even with sales slumping, is moving just shy of 2 million per year.

With the new pay package being laid out over a 10-year period, that means the target has gone from 20 million EVs per year by 2030 to just 20 million total by 2035.

One million robotaxis*

One of Musk’s most infamous and outrageous promises about Tesla came in 2019, when he claimed that the company would have one million robotaxis on the road in 2020. It’s now 2025, and Tesla has only just begun to trial a robotaxi service in Austin, Texas that has, at most, around 20 or 30 cars with safety drivers on board.

To access his full proposed pay package, Tesla is asking Musk to help the company realize an altered version of that promise, as another product goal listed is to have “1 million Robotaxis in Commercial Operation.”

It’s a goal with caveats. The fine print shows that Tesla is only requiring there to be a “daily average aggregate” of one million robotaxis “commercially operated by or on behalf of [Tesla] over a consecutive three-month period, as part of a transportation service.”

Tesla goes on to define “Robotaxi” as any Tesla vehicle, including but not limited to the purpose-built “Cybercab” it’s developing, that is using the company’s Full Self-Driving software to offer rides to people.

This includes customer-owned vehicles, which is another thing Musk has long promised but never delivered. He’s spent years claiming that Tesla could flip a digital switch and turn existing vehicles into fully-autonomous ones, and that owners could add and subtract those vehicles to a larger robotaxi fleet at will.

But Musk has since said many of the Teslas currently on the road don’t have the necessary hardware for the former to happen, and the company has yet to demonstrate the latter. Regardless, Musk now has an even looser timeline to try and make both things happen.

One million “bots”?

Musk sees Tesla’s future being all about the humanoid robot that it’s developing, called Optimus. Just this week he claimed it could make up as much as 80% of the company’s future revenue.

As he became increasingly focused on Optimus, Musk made some pretty wild promises about what that future would look like. One of his core claims was that Tesla will be making one million Optimus bots per year by as early as 2029.

And yet, Tesla’s board is only asking Musk to deliver one million “bots” total as part of this proposed compensation plan. Tesla also defines “bots” as “any robot or other physical product with mobility using artificial intelligence manufactured by or on behalf of the Company” — though the company’s vehicles do not count.

The directors seem to agree that Optimus has “the potential to be Tesla’s bestselling product,” and they say it reperesents “the clearest example of how Tesla has the ability to make autonomy benefit all of humanity.”

But the board also notes that “commercialization plans” for Optimus are “still in development,” and Musk now has until 2035 to reach the one million mark.

Everything else

The fourth and final product goal Musk has to achieve is to notch 10 million active subscriptions to Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) software. It’s arguably the most ambitious product goal. The company does not say how many current owners have paid for FSD, though executives have recently said the adoption rate is in the “teens.” At best, that means anywhere from a few hundred thousand to the low millions of Tesla vehicles have the software installed.

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.”

Taken as a whole, it’s a complex agreement with lots of truly pie-in-the-sky ideas about where Tesla could go under Musk’s leadership over the next decade. The same was said about the previous compensation deal that Tesla struck with Musk back in 2018, and yet the company hit all of those seemingly-outrageous goals. (Musk’s award was ultimately dusted by Delaware’s Chancery Court.)

Still, it’s hard not to notice just how much these new goals appear to come from the company trying to drag its CEO’s promises back down to Earth.