Billion-Dollar Award Made a CEO Uneasy. Now He's Fixing It
- Some Axon employees could collect multimillion-dollar payouts
- ‘We figured out how to scale the Elon Musk magic,’ Smith says
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The prospect of a billion-dollar windfall left Rick Smith uneasy.
It crept up on the chief executive officer in February, while he was telling employees about an audacious goal to grow Taser-maker Axon Enterprise Inc., the firm he founded in 1993, by more than fivefold over the next decade. If they could pull it off, shareholders would see handsome returns and Smith would pocket about $1.3 billion through a radical compensation plan.