Is Elon Musk worth his £44bn Tesla pay package?

Elon Musk may once again go his own way.

His Tesla payout deal – worth up to $56bn (£44bn) depending on the company’s share price – has now been backed by shareholders as 75% of all spending on schools study in England in 2024-25 (£60 billion) and around a quarter of the NHS budget (£192 billion).

To his many admirers, Mr. Musk is worth every penny he achieves – and shareholders agreed, with approximately 72% of voting shares support the deal.

His businesses include Tesla, SpaceX, X (formerly Twitter), Starlink, Neuralink and X.ai, his latest AI project.

You could argue that Tesla opened up the electric vehicle market in the US, SpaceX just launched the world’s most powerful rocket into space and a man volunteered to be the first person to have a Neuralink microchip implanted in his brain now can control computers using their thoughts.

Today, the $56 billion question is: would this portfolio succeed without him?

You could say that Musk’s pay deal is essentially to keep him at Tesla.

Before 2018, when he was approved by the company’s board of directors, there was much speculation about his future at the electric car manufacturer.

The deal is structured in such a way that if Mr. Musk fails to hit certain milestones — such as Tesla’s market value, underlying revenue and profits — he won’t be paid at all.

Even so, at that stage, he was hardly digging under the back of the sofa to find loose change because his assets were nearly $20 billion, according to Forbes magazine’s 2018 rich list.

But if he achieves certain goals, the potential salary will be huge.

To be fair, Mr. Musk has achieved the goals set for himself. For example, Tesla’s market value has increased from $54 billion to the $650 billion target set in the original deal.

Since then, it has dropped to $570 billion.

When Tesla floundered in 2022, it was said that it was because Mr. Musk took his eye off the ball to focus on X – so it was his absence, not his presence, that caused the problem.

However, his profile clearly brings enormous value to these companies.

Mr. Musk doesn’t believe in media groups, preferring instead to broadcast live to his 187 million social media followers.

If you have Mr Musk by your side, your PR will take care of itself with mixed but always outstanding results.

He generates countless global news headlines from behind his keyboard and you could argue that very, very few people have that kind of power – the publicity that money can’t buy.

He also has enormous political influence: he has met a number of world leaders, including Chinese President Xi Jinping. He claimed to have spoken to Russian President Vladimir Putin by phone and once live-streamed a conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

He is a fierce and demanding boss, a workaholic who doesn’t take no for an answer. Former employees say even the most dedicated among them burn out, and he doesn’t.

Dolly Singh, who worked at SpaceX for Mr Musk from 2008 to 2013, previously told BBC News he was an “incredible leader”.

“If that wasn’t the case, he wouldn’t have achieved what he has,” she said in 2022.

But she also admitted that working for him was “exhausting.”

Although shareholders support Mr. Musk’s pay package, legal experts said it remains unclear whether the court that blocked the deal will grant a re-vote and allow the company to restore Musk’s wages. him or not.

However, former Tesla backer Steve Westly told the BBC earlier this year that keeping Musk was not out of the question.

“Elon is a man of unique vision…but I don’t know whether that means he’s needed to run any or all of those companies today,” he said.

“No one stays at the top forever, especially when you’re trying to lead seven companies at once.”

And for all the successes under Mr. Musk, there have also been failures.

For years, Tesla didn’t make a profit, then a tweet about the company going private caused financial chaos, ending in an investigation by regulators leading to his resignation as CEO.

I spoke with two former employees who claimed that speaking out about safety concerns at Tesla cost them their jobs and professional reputations.

Tesla is almost bankrupt. Not all of SpaceX’s rocket launches are successful, and each failure costs the company millions of dollars. The Neuralink chip began to malfunction shortly after being implanted, although this was fixed.

Mr Musk recently claimed that Starlink has now broken even financially – but Bloomberg has published a report suggesting that he underestimated the huge costs of deploying satellite network infrastructure.

But America has a different view on risky business.

“The US market is not only large but also tends to take bigger hits,” Mustafa Suleyman, who co-founded Google DeepMind and recently joined Microsoft, told the BBC.

He added that the UK could be “more tolerant and more celebratory of failures”.

If Mr. Musk is hurt by failure, he doesn’t show it. On the outside he is loud, dominating and defiant.

Today he said he sent a cake to Delaware, which tried to block his $56 billion Tesla settlement.

It is decorated with his favorite phrase “vox populei, vox dei” – the voice of the people is the voice of God.

Additional reporting by Dearbail Jordan.