Tesla Is Offering Musk a $1,000,000,000,000 Ransom

Tesla Inc.’s latest Master Plan is, as I noted here, too vague to be an actual plan. The real details have dropped soon after in the form of a proxy statement. This is largely an extended argument for a new, roughly trillion-dollar compensation plan for Chief Executive Elon Musk. It serves to both embellish Tesla’s latest pitch and remind everyone, even if unintentionally, of the company’s hollow governance.

Over the past two years, Tesla’s core electric vehicle business has flipped from growth to decline, amid setbacks such as the Cybertruck flop and the politicization of the brand, both of which Musk owns. During that time, however, the board has appeared to mostly engage itself in restoring a multi-billion-dollar compensation package for Musk that was agreed in 2018 but struck down by a Delaware court over conflicts of interest and disclosure issues.