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Elon Musk demands another huge payday from Tesla

In a series of posts on X Monday night, Musk said that he would not want to grow Tesla to become a leader in artificial intelligence and robotics without a compensation plan that would give him ownership of around 25% of the company’s stock. That would be about double the roughly 13% stake he currently owns.

Just casually asking for a roughly 80 Billion dollar pay raise. But at this point would Tesla be better off without him?

Empricorn ,

Maybe he shouldn't have spent all that money on avocado toast buying a failing social media platform

interdimensionalmeme ,

Just fire the cunt ! Into space !

doctorcrimson ,

RIP Tesla Bagholders. Remember when people laughed at Bill Gates for his Tesla Shorts?

ratcliff ,
@ratcliff@lemmy.wtf avatar

I think Tesla would do better if he walked away. The whole fake Iron Man shtick was hardly believable a decade ago

cheeseandkrakens ,

I don't think his ego will allow him to do that

KingThrillgore ,
@KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml avatar

As opposed to dunking on him, I am going to outline why he can't do anything but cry about it:

  • Once you IPO in Delaware like Tesla did, you can't issue a second class stock
  • At least not without liquidating your assets and re-incorporating, which means all shareholders have to agree and this certainly means shareholders will hold a smaller bag, this will go to court (probably in Delaware, a state Elon has little chance of winning given how Twitter/X turned out), and the process will be impeded. This is not an overnight process.

This is compounded by the fact that Tesla's stock value pretty much comes from Elon's manipulation and grandstanding, so anything that reveals this will cause the boat to rock, so anything he does will impact the stock price, which impacts his wealth.

Nobody will loan him money to buy more stock. If he could, he wouldn't be crying about it. Or, more than likely, he could get it, but it means coming from MBS or similarly questionable sources and he's on such good footing with them over how Twitter/X is going. This will increase the scrutiny he's getting from the DOJ or the people at CIA who may drop a sword on his head.

He has at least two loyalists on his board: Kimbal Musk and JB Straubel. James Murdoch can no longer be considered one since its his other publication, the Wall Street Journal, that went to press about his drug issues.

Long and short, Elon has been reduced to begging. We could be watching the end of his tenure at Tesla, but this fucker is full of surprises.

cashews_best_nut ,
@cashews_best_nut@lemmy.world avatar

You think he'd bother with legal and responsible methods of getting his way?

My first thought is he'd threaten to tank Tesla stock by using Twitter to screw it over and sink the price. It fucks him but why would he care when he still owns SpaceX and Twitter?

He's been using Twitter to manipulate shares and crypto for years. He now owns Twitter and can manipulate even more so will use it to bully Tesla's board for more equity.

OldWoodFrame ,

I mean he "can do nothing but cry about it" in the same way anyone can do nothing about a request for a raise. He can say he will quit if they don't give it to him.

Red_October ,

And their reply? "Oh no! Anyway..."

MeanEYE ,
@MeanEYE@lemmy.world avatar

Explained nicely by Common Sense Skeptic in their video on the subject. TLDW is that Musk is low on stocks, around 12%, and he's demanding to be given more (total 25%) or he walks. Reason he wants 25% is so that he can still be in charge of company with other people who proxy his power.

ohlaph ,

Sounds like he wants out and this is his option.

OldWoodFrame ,

Can't really tell what he WANTS to do since he also wanted out of the X CEO role.

Maybe just ketamine.

Theharpyeagle ,

If I were him I'd simply retire and enjoy my magnitudes of lifetimes worth of wealth. But I guess that's not the billionaire mindset.

Pulptastic ,

I mean, it seems he's bad for Tesla's image so....

MeanEYE ,
@MeanEYE@lemmy.world avatar

He's already out with 12.9% of stocks, we wants in for free claiming he'll walk out with other parts of the company and people if they don't oblige. If you are thinking that this behavior is not legal you'd be right and I can't wait for trade commission to step on him.

KingThrillgore ,
@KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml avatar

If I made a demand like this I'd be fired

Deello ,

Yeah but you're not the CEO of the company.

KingThrillgore ,
@KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml avatar

If I made a threat like this as CEO when I also work two other jobs with a now clearly defined conflict of interest, I would ABSOLUTELY be fired by the board!

If the board wasn't made up of asskissers.

fosforus ,

What do you mean by this? CEOs are fired from companies all the time.

zbyte64 ,
@zbyte64@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Guy is probably getting scared of his board members and is wanting to secure himself from being outed. There's a reason why we are now hearing about his drug problem, and those stories are likely coming from his board members.

Buffaloaf ,

They realize he's tainted the Tesla brand and are trying to get rid of him.

ShindangAp ,

There's all these things that people say about how he's garbage and does nothing right, but the guy has managed to be involved with the project that made it easy to make payments over the internet, and then went on to be behind the most successful electric car and, of course, there's also SpaceX...

I have no idea about the details behind this other than what a Redditor coworker who totally negs on Elon has told me - all this inside baseball at PayPal that seems unflattering, and, of course, the persistent accusations that he brings nothing to the table...

But does lightening really strike thrice like that? IDK. Plus I am sympathetic to his desire to make X more free speech friendly - he isn't completely consistent in this, but it is better than what came before.

I am just going to give him the benefit of the doubt on this - not in saying that he absolutely deserves this raise, but in saying that he has a right to ask for it without being laughed out of the room.

Serinus ,

he isn’t completely consistent in this, but it is better than what came before.

This is a joke, right? He brings back nazis under the guise of "free speech" while also doing this: X / Twitter purges then reinstates journalists, podcasters, and leftist accounts critical of Elon Musk.

ShindangAp ,

Right, he isn't entirely consistent.

But it is also not the case that he is bringing back literal Nazis - last I checked Jared Taylor was not reinstated, Andrew Anglin is nowhere to be seen, and Kanye West was banned after his remarks. I think the list goes on- every once in a while you do see the Nazis complaining about this because, of course, it isn't hard to stay on that platform... Which si also why it's silly he didn't bring Jared Taylor back on - he was not removed because he said any slurs or was obscene, but was simply removed by Dorsey and the gang because he is an open "race realist."

Of course, I was flabbergasted when I saw that they would treat "from the river to the sea" as a call to genocide on X, and I really felt like he completely dropped the ball there. Nonetheless, it was a general improvement, though it is not what I would have envisioned.

Serinus ,

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/febad0d4-fdd5-4bf4-aa02-b8f9db4b901c.jpeg

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/c0db2c25-02b8-4b8a-8ad3-2b74ccc5e41e.webp

(Besides just the fact that it's not true. There are plenty of alternate reality stories where the Nazis won; they just don't like those because they're still the bad guys.

Serinus ,

Just in case you needed evidence of alt-right racism on Twitter, here's some from today.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/b44cff7d-c28c-4086-b83b-b4dcff6dfaa1.webp

Botanicals ,

Nah.

kurap1ka ,

The chance of success is impressive, but it's just correlation to wealth in the family. From Microsoft over cloud flare, Amazon to tesla each and every one of those successful men had a rich daddy.

ShindangAp ,

Not wrong at all - it's also the case that the guy who founded Netflix had dozens of sticks in the fire - lots of failed enterprises he was trying out elsewhere, and this one just hit. He didn't even come up with the model, really, for Netflix.... he's just a privileged venture capitalist.

But what does that mean for us? Obviously, I wish it was me with the generational wealth, and not them. Obviously, I would prefer for 10,000 people to be lifted out of generational poverty in the Congo than to create more millionaires... But I treat the super wealthy capitalists tossing around massive wealth like this as something I do not have the right to do much about other than taxing them at a higher rate.

When they deliver good products by creating companies that utilize a lot of talent, I clap.

I think it is the case that technology and the mass production of goods will do more to alleviate poverty than anything else...

I mean, you go to poor countries now and even the poor people have access to a wealth of information and such through their non-flag smartphones you've never heard of. That's just wonderful. It has also assisted us by letting us see what is going on in Gaza first hand. So, all these billionaires & multimillionaire investors have actually contributed to society through the decades by bringing us to a point where even fairly poor people in India or Iran can not just enjoy having internet access and a smartphone, but can also use it to report on corruption and undermine corrupt & terrible governments.

_sideffect ,

He brings ZERO value to tesla after all his FSD lies and others were exposed.

Sure people still fall for tesla crap, but he himself is useless now.

nandeEbisu ,

He brought shareholders value by getting people pumped to buy the car.

wahming ,

Brought being the key word, he no longer does so

Mamertine ,

I'm literally not buying a Tesla because he's a douchbag.

When I see a Tesla on the road I assume they are a Musk fan boy. There's no prestige in that brand. There are a lot of us that assume that.

Blue_Morpho ,

I would be more likely to buy a Tesla if Musk was gone. He is poisonous to the brand.

nbafantest ,

I think pretty much everyone would be

Daze ,

I would be more likely to buy a Tesla if the cars weren't engineered like garbage.

fosforus , (edited )

I can feel the disgust of the car being related to Elon Musk, but at least the newer Teslas are actually great cars. Not sure where this idea of poor quality comes from. My previous car was a Toyota and I don't really miss it at all.

When I was making my choice of an EV, Polestars were too expensive and the Hyundais were too synthwave and gray. Volkswagens were shit. Tesla was practically the only choice.

I do hope there will be more serious competition the next time I have to choose. But I'm hoping I won't have to make that choice in at least 5 years.

someguy7734206 ,

Tesla cars also have notoriously poor build quality, especially for the price; if you must buy an electric car, at this point, as far as I can tell, Hyundai cars are much better built. (Of course, we do need to remember that electric cars do not solve the problem of car dependency.)

not_again ,

I bought my Tesla 4 years ago before EM went full douche mode. I actually quite like the car but would not buy one these days on account of him.

n3m37h ,

He has always been useless bang

Its just his money that is useful

EmergMemeHologram ,

Much like the PT cruiser, there's a due hard group of people in love with cyber truck, he made that happen.

Personally I think it looks stupid as hell, but since people are very into it.

GiveMemes ,

He created a massive failure with a cult following? Because that's what the PT cruiser was. The difference with the cybertruck being that it won't sell to rental companies on account of the price.

“It was a novelty car, and like all novelty items the enthusiasm faded,” says Keenan Mayo, associate editor at Bloomberg Businessweek, who wrote an obituary of sorts for the Cruiser. “The only people who were really buying it for much of the last decade were the rental car companies because it was cheap.”

https://www.marketplace.org/2013/03/04/goodbye-pt-cruiser-will-anyone-miss-it/

EmergMemeHologram ,

Cyber truck is 100% a novelty car designed to make an annoying CEO happy and presumably away from the serious projects.

KingThrillgore ,
@KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml avatar

Cybertruck is a mistake made in Solidworks allowed to go to production.

commandar ,

The PT Cruiser was more or less a Dodge Neon with a funny looking body shell on top, meaning engineering cost to bring it to market was pretty minimal.

The Cybertruck is... pretty much the opposite of that. Tesla has spent literally years trying to get the thing to market meaning it's failure will be far more painful than PT Cruiser sales tapering off was for Chrysler.

nbafantest ,

If they could get someone boring like Tim Apple Cook, that just runs the company very well and profitably... Tesla would be sitting pretty good with their dominant place in the Electric market. The only reason most people dont pick tesla for an EV is literally Elon.

demesisx ,
@demesisx@infosec.pub avatar

Unfortunately, idiot Elon gets his grubby fingers ALL OVER every last piece of tech in the Tesla. It’s ALL shoddily engineered because of him. Like simple, time tested engineering concepts like redundancy? Elon would fire you. He eliminated redundancy in their FSD, choosing to rely solely on computer vision and machine learning. He literally had a good design for the sensor modules and got rid of it. Tim Cook doesn’t sabotage Apple’s engineering team like that.

CaptainPedantic ,

The lidar removal really pissed me off. At best, a Tesla can "see" as well as the human driver. It seems to me that half of the point of using a computer to drive a vehicle should be that it can easily access sensors that us meat bags don't have access to.

Plus the stupid central instrument cluster in Model 3s and Model Ys is beyond idiotic.

Tja ,

Not the only reason... I'm happy with my model 3, but it's not for everyone based on objective properties.

KingThrillgore ,
@KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml avatar

The problem with Tesla is the problem Apple had for many years: Your CEO is the reason for the stock price. Apple had a plan for succession that saved them in the end, and they've never been better. Tesla has nothing. They are basically a carbon credit company run by a sycophant, and without Elon, they are nothing but a carbon credit company. If he departs, the stock price will crater/adjust.

Last time we had a CEO get fired because they were bad was the OpenAI fiasco and that proved that we no longer live in reality, because Sam was back in a week.

Taldan ,

Sam was fired because the board stated he withheld information and misinformed them, not because he was a bad CEO

ours ,

Yep, the company was doing crazy well financially.

nbafantest ,

Apple had a plan, but Apple also had the iPhone and the MacBook. Literally the best smartphones and laptops you can buy.

Tesla does have the best EVs and, in the US, charging network. I think saying "tesla has nothing" is a bit disingenuous. Outside of China, no company is even close to Tesla.

lefaucet , (edited )

Tesla has the following:

Custom AI silicon designed by the designer of Apple's M1 chip. It's designed for training. They are about to scale it massively to create the Dojo supercomputer. They look to be on par with NVidia on performance/$. No small feat, and means they arent reliant on NVidia

They have custom inferrence chips used in all of their cars and their android robot. It gets fantastic performance per watt. My 5 year old car has first-gen inferrence chips and it's still getting better with software... meaning it hasnt reached its potential. The latest chip design is probably much better, but I dont know much about it

They have possibly the best humanoid hands and arms that will work with this AI goodness.

Their walking and navigation is looking to be top notch... We'll see

FSD really is incredible. I drive with it and it improves every year.

Tesla solar is still a thing. The model 3 kinda derailed development a while back and it never really recovered. I think competitors are doing well and Tesla sees better returns on their other projects. Tesla needs to bring down their Solar prices which they just dont seem to be doing. Im guessing they dont want to scale manufacturing yet.

They have some of the largest casting machines on the planet and press out the frames of their cars for far cheaper than their competition can stamp and weld theirs. Stellantis and Toyota are adopting this manufactiring strategy as fast as they can, but they are a year or maybe 2 behind. I suspect Ford, VW and GM are adopting this too.

Tesla factory floors are much more efficient at iterating and improving. Their in-house software for managing workers and workflow development are unique to Tesla.
Just look at the efficient packaging of their HVAC system after dozens of iterations every year for a couple years. It's by far the best HVAC in the car world.

They have developed a lithium clay extraction process that vastly reduces chemical waste and water usage. They're still 5 or so years out from implementing this in even a small capacity and clay extraction isnt guaranteed to be superior to spodumene. I expect the efforts they're putting to this will pay off in 15 years.

They own lithium clay rights in Nevada where some of the richest Lithium clay deposits are. I think theyre doing permitting for mining, which will probably take to the end of the decade. Mining's crazy

They offer the best price for grid-scale batteries and are growing that business faster than their cars grew. Hawaii just replaced their last coal peaker plant with Tesla batteries. California and Australia are saving a lot of money with them. The batteries pay for themselves when used to replace peaker plants and stuff to maintain frequency.

They are growing so-called virtual power plants and have been doing extremely well in a few test locations in Texas, Australia and Puerto Rico. I think the UK too?

After funding and working with the inventor of the lithium battery's team they've been getting first looks at new battery chemistry. The thick walls of their 4680 are designed with adding silicon in mind. I suspect theyre testing this out at Kato road production facility.

They've collected a bunch of battery manufacturing patents over the years and their dry-electrode process is providing very good economics. Getting them to scale has been excruciatingly slow, but they're about to triple capacity this year in Texas and I think are starting development of another iteration of their 4680 battery production process at their Kato road facility right now.

They are on track for becoming a top-three battery manufacturer by the end of the decade.

GM and Ford's battery packs are like 5 years behind tesla's. Tesla packs more battery in less volume using less weight with better thermals and ridgidity. Their packs are a lot cheaper to produce too.

Tesla claims they have a ferro magnet motor in development. We'll see. If so, watch out for very cheap electric cars with no rare-earths or cobalt

They just signed deals with BP and an another conglomerate to sell chargers for the other business' charging infrastructure. More volume means cheaper manufacturing for their own charging stations too.

All cars will soon have the NACS plug so everyone will be able to charge at a Tesla station... Which is the largest and most reliable charging network in the world.

Battery prices keep falling. Gas cars are going to have to compete with cheaper electric by the end of the decade. Tesla isnt competing with other electric car makers so much as it's competing with fossil fuels. Electric will win this. The faster the better

Elon has contributed to these only in a "we're gonna fund these wild ideas!" Way. Like Edison. He's smart and avoided bad projects and embraced fast failing to great success... Things are maturing and I dont think there's much value to get from Elon...

Tesla will be fine without Elon. I'd argue better.

The only fear of Elon leaving would be big oil investors buying control and derailing things... I dont think that'll happen though. I think enough investors are in it specifically to eliminate fossil fuel dependency.

The fear of Elon staying is he drags Tesla into his edgelord bullshit and uses it to dick over the world as hard as he and some dictator/billionaire friends can... Which seems more likely

After he derailed the CA bullet train with his hyperloop hyperbole and joked on twitter abould the Bolivian coup, I dont trust his ass one bit.

Furbag ,

Well, so much for the altruist Elon Musk who uses his genius intellect to make the world a better place out of the goodness of his heart and the shared benefit of humanity. if he actually gave a shit, he wouldn't care if his compensation package was $1. He would supposedly be doing the work he is the most passionate about and cares the most about.

Nah. Richest man in the world says it's more important that he gets paid first. He's always been a fraud.

NotMyOldRedditName , (edited )

If you only read the headline (and maybe even this specific article) you miss the point.

He's saying he doesn't trust Tesla to develop AI/Robotics if he doesn't have enough control (shares), as he's afraid what they'll do with AI otherwise, and without another compensation package that would give him that control, he's going to hold Tesla back on the AI front and do it in a company he has control of (him saying this is probably breaking numerous laws as well, especially given he has an AI company)

It's his same AI is going to doom the world if it's not done right, and only I can protect us, though this isn't really something new.

But as to your point, it isn't actually about the money, it's about more control of Tesla. He doesn't actually care about the money and if there was a way to give him more voting control without giving him more shares, he'd be okay with that too, but that in itself isn't a simple feat or necessarily possible.

But FUCK HIM, he gave up that control to piss it away on Twitter. If keeping control of Tesla was so important, you shouldn't have fucked up, and fucked over all the shareholders in the process with Twitter.

Edit: Also - Even though he met every tranche of his existing compensation plan, it was a 10 year plan. It hasn't been 10 years yet, so again, FUCK OFF, until those 10 years are up.

just_change_it ,

He doesn't need to own 25% of tesla's shares to be given 25% of voting power. It's very common for different classes of shares for a company to exist that have entirely different voting rights.

Goodie ,

I believe in order for that to work, the shares have to be set up for that during IPO. I'm not sure of any company that's done it mid-flight (but I could be wrong).

Serinus ,

They have, but it's done before diluting shares. Generally people with voting power don't vote that power away from themselves.

KingThrillgore ,
@KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml avatar

They also can't re-issue dual shares in Delaware, where Tesla is incorporated.

xantoxis ,

Both the AI and Musk need to fucking go. And even then I'd give it another 10 years of quality control before I'd consider owning a Tesla.

dynamojoe ,

I look forward to voting against that proposal, if it ever comes up before the shareholders. If he spins off companies to compete against Tesla while still working for it, he'd get sued to pieces.

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