Matt Levine, Columnist

It Pays to Be Loved by Tesla. Ask Elon Musk.

What's a thoughtful gift for a billionaire aficionado of rocket ships and sports cars and flamethrowers? More money.

March 23, 2018 at 6:00 AM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

The extra $50 billion is just a cherry on top.

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This post originally appeared in Money Stuff.

What does Elon Musk's utility function look like? Yesterday Tesla Inc. shareholders approved a comically large pay package designed to keep Musk employed as Tesla's chief executive officer. When we last talked about this pay package I mentioned how superfluous it seems to be. If Musk hits all of his revenue and earnings targets over the next 10 years, and grows Tesla to be worth $650 billion, then he could make more than $50 billion from his new package. But if Musk grows Tesla to be worth $650 billion over the next 10 years -- whether or not he hits those revenue and earnings targets -- then he will make more than $130 billion just from the Tesla shares he already owns. The extra $50 billion on top of the $130 billion would be nice, I guess, but ... how? Like what will he do with it? Buy more flamethrowers?