"The Paradox of Elon Musk's $29 Billion Tesla Payday: Firing Him Risks Corporate Collapse" | Vanity Fair

By now you’ve likely heard the news that Tesla has awarded Elon Musk 96 million shares of the company, valued at $29 billion. Despite his foray into politics contributing to a 25% drop in the company’s stock price. Despite his market-moving feud with the president. Despite his intention to start a new political party, which has also impacted the stock—and not in a good way. Now, you might be thinking: Wait, if everything Musk has done lately has been bad for Tesla, why is the board making him nearly $30 billion richer, as opposed to showing him the door, as would typically be the case in corporate America? “The point of view of Tesla investors is that they just don’t have a choice,” Max Chafkin, cohost of the Elon, Inc. podcast, tells Vanity Fair. “You can’t threaten to fire him, because if you threaten to fire him, you blow up the company.”

Which means the people with a vested interest in Tesla’s stock going up have to instead hope that the shares Musk was awarded this week, which he can access after two years, will convince him to spend less time on politics and more time on his actual job. In a letter to shareholders, board members Robyn Denholm and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson wrote of the package, “We know that one of your top concerns is keeping Elon’s energies focused on Tesla,” adding that the stock grant was “a critical first step toward achieving that goal.”

Incredibly, the award package does not require Musk to meet any performance goals; it simply requires him to remain in a senior leadership role at the company for two years, which should be straightforward enough—though, when one is talking about a guy whose hobbies include running his own personal sperm bank, nothing is straightforward.

As for whether the nearly $30 billion will actually keep Elon’s “energies” focused on Tesla? That remains an open question. While the award represents an astronomical sum to 99.99999% of the population—Musk was already the richest person in the world —this is not a situation of, like, your average white-collar worker being all, “Ugh, I really want to quit my job, but I can’t until I get my bonus next year.”

On the other hand, increasing Musk’s paper net worth “makes his empire more stable,” Chafkin says. (In addition to Tesla, Musk’s business empire includes, among other things, space-technology company Space X; neurotechnology start-up Neuralink; infrastructure firm the Boring Company; and X (née Twitter).) “It’s really important, when you think about Musk, there are his separate companies but they’re interlocked, and the thing that’s tying them together is Elon Musk,” Chafkin notes. “It’s not like he’s going to buy a bigger house.… By his own account, the reason he wants to make all this money is because he wants to take humanity to Mars, and $30 billion is going to make a difference. Thirty billion dollars is $30 billion.” Still, Chafkin says, “The idea that he’s going to leave politics is just fanciful—he is inherently political. He’s still, on any given day, tweeting about politics.” (Recent posts have included calling the treasury secretary a “Soros stooge” and asking, “How can people be expected to have faith in Trump if he won’t release the Epstein files?”)

As for Musk’s new political party, which he said he would form after polling his social media followers? According to a new report from Axios, Musk apparently “hasn’t taken visible steps to make formal filings for the America Party, and once-frenetic whispers from third-party consultants about working for him have gone radio silent.” But he has not turned off the money spigot; according to Politico, Musk gave $15 million in donations to super PACs supporting Trump and the GOP in June—after he said he’d “done enough” political spending.

Still, Chafkin tells me, there’s a question of how he’s going to participate. “From the point of view of the Tesla board, it would be better if he didn’t have a feud with Donald Trump. But I don’t think the stock grant resolves that.”

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