Tesla shareholders approved a pay package on Thursday that could make CEO Elon Musk, already the world’s richest person, the world’s first trillionaire.
Tesla announced that more than 75% of shares voted in favor of the pay package during the company’s annual shareholder meeting. The vote didn’t include the 15% of the company that Musk already owns.
Musk thanked the shareholders and the Tesla board soon after the vote was announced. “I super appreciate it,” he said.
Musk doesn’t take any salary, but the approved pay package comes in the form of a stock grant that would give him as much as 423.7 million additional Tesla shares over the next 10 years.
Those shares could be worth about $1 trillion, assuming the company reaches the $8.5 trillion market cap needed to have Musk qualify for the full potential payout. In addition, Tesla needs to achieve a series of either operational or financial targets for him to get the full number of shares, which would be distributed in 12 equal blocks.
Getting all the shares available under this package over the next 10 years would be the equivalent of earning $275 million a day, dwarfing any other executive pay package in history.
