One trillion dollars: This sum, the potential remuneration in a package that Elon Musk had Tesla shareholders approve for him, on Thursday, November 6, has taken American capitalism into uncharted territory, the realm of entrepreneurs whose wealth defies reason, and who grant themselves the right to seize 12% of a company by sole virtue of their talent.
The news sparked two opposing reactions. Some were appalled by such a stupendous pay package, including progressive Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Pope Leo XIV. Others, who recalculated their figures, such as Tesla’s shareholders, saw no harm in Musk taking a substantial share of their capital if he manages to multiply the company’s value fivefold: This is common practice in private equity.
Morality versus pragmatic opportunism. Both perspectives deserve to be taken with nuance. First, the fortunes of billionaires do not seem to disturb the social order in the United States much, or at least far less than in Europe or France. There has been no major campaign against Musk’s fortune, unlike the controversies around his forays into politics, despite the fact that cost-of-living issues were among the main reasons for Joe Biden’s defeat in 2024, and then the Democrats’ victories in the November 4 elections.
Power struggle
On the other hand, the Tesla shareholders made concessions that may seem unnecessary. The Chinese company BYD has excelled in the electric vehicle sector without having to pay its leaders on such a scale; nothing guarantees that Musk will actually focus on Tesla, as his current obsession is catching up in artificial intelligence technology and developing another of his companies, xAI, which has merged with the platform formerly known as Twitter, now X. Ultimately, what the shareholders feared most was that Musk would walk away if he were not given free rein, thereby causing Tesla’s already sky-high value, which is based on his reputation, to plummet. Some would say it was all just a power struggle – others would call it blackmail.
More fundamentally, the situation resembles a magical or science fiction story. Unlocking the pay package requires, among other things, multiplying Tesla’s value by five and transforming the company into one that manufactures robo-taxis and humanoid robots. Perhaps Musk, the hyper-billionaire, will succeed, just as he revolutionized the car and space industries, such as with SpaceX. Nobody had believed that he would manage to meet the requirements of previous pay packages – one of which has been struck down in court.
The latest package has only one purpose: to portray Musk as a superhuman being. This remuneration plan is not designed to serve any practical function. It is solely meant to signal that the entrepreneur is a new kind of man, one to whom none of society’s basic rules apply, and one for whom everything is allowed. He seems to be on the verge of breaking away from the community of humankind, with his dreams of colonizing Mars, creating millions of humanoid robots and pursuing transhumanism. This drift, which has also swept up a growing part of the US tech sector, is the business world’s version of the behavior Donald Trump, who also doesn’t recognize any limits, has embodied in politics. Both stand at the crossroads of hubris and indecency – a combination it is high time to break with.
