Tesla has proposed an enormous new $1 trillion compensation package deal for its CEO Elon Musk, and most of the benchmarks he must hit are merely watered-down variations of guarantees he’s spent years making in regards to the firm.

That’s not the image Tesla’s board of administrators paints within the firm’s annual proxy statement, the place they revealed the proposed pay package deal. As a substitute, the board focuses on the way it plans to create “essentially the most worthwhile firm in historical past.”

To make sure, if Tesla accomplishes all that it goals for with this deal, it’s going to seem like a a lot totally different firm on the finish of the 10-year interval it covers. That doesn’t change the truth that the milestones the corporate is asking Musk to goal for are much less bold than his personal previously-stated objectives.

Whereas the unprecedented pay package deal nonetheless must be authorized by shareholders at a gathering in November, it’s simple to see the corporate’s fervent fan base voting “sure.” Earlier votes on Musk’s compensation have been overwhelmingly authorized by Tesla’s shareholders.

With that in thoughts, let’s check out what Musk wants to perform as a way to obtain the total payout.

20 million vehicles … complete

Musk spent years claiming Tesla would be capable to make 20 million electrical autos per 12 months by 2030. This was again when he and his firm had been nonetheless promising to develop at a fee of fifty% every year.

However Tesla walked away from these guarantees as gross sales development stalled, after which reversed in 2024. The corporate then pulled the 20-million-per-year aim from its affect report last year, and stopped constructing a deliberate manufacturing unit in Mexico that would have increased production.

Now, the primary “product aim” that Tesla’s board of administrators laid out for Musk to attain on his path to turning into a trillionaire is to ship 20 million autos complete. Tesla has already bought eight million vehicles so far, and even with gross sales slumping, is shifting simply shy of two million per 12 months.

With the brand new pay package deal being laid out over a 10-year interval, meaning the goal has gone from 20 million EVs per 12 months by 2030 to only 20 million complete by 2035.

A million robotaxis*

One in all Musk’s most notorious and outrageous guarantees about Tesla got here in 2019, when he claimed that the corporate would have one million robotaxis on the road in 2020. It’s now 2025, and Tesla has solely simply begun to trial a robotaxi service in Austin, Texas that has, at most, round 20 or 30 vehicles with safety drivers on board.

To entry his full proposed pay package deal, Tesla is asking Musk to assist the corporate notice an altered model of that promise, as one other product aim listed is to have “1 million Robotaxis in Business Operation.”

It’s a aim with caveats. The tremendous print reveals that Tesla is barely requiring there to be a “every day common mixture” of 1 million robotaxis “commercially operated by or on behalf of [Tesla] over a consecutive three-month interval, as a part of a transportation service.”

Tesla goes on to outline “Robotaxi” as any Tesla automobile, together with however not restricted to the purpose-built “Cybercab” it’s growing, that’s utilizing the corporate’s Full Self-Driving software program to supply rides to folks.

This consists of customer-owned autos, which is one other factor Musk has lengthy promised however by no means delivered. He’s spent years claiming that Tesla might flip a digital change and switch current autos into fully-autonomous ones, and that homeowners might add and subtract these autos to a bigger robotaxi fleet at will.

However Musk has since stated many of the Teslas currently on the road don’t have the necessary hardware for the previous to occur, and the corporate has but to show the latter. Regardless, Musk now has an excellent looser timeline to attempt to make each issues occur.

A million “bots”?

Musk sees Tesla’s future being all in regards to the humanoid robotic that it’s growing, referred to as Optimus. Simply this week he claimed it might make up as a lot as 80% of the corporate’s future income.

As he grew to become more and more targeted on Optimus, Musk made some fairly wild guarantees about what that future would seem like. One in all his core claims was that Tesla shall be making a million Optimus bots per 12 months by as early as 2029.

And but, Tesla’s board is barely asking Musk to ship a million “bots” complete as a part of this proposed compensation plan. Tesla additionally defines “bots” as “any robotic or different bodily product with mobility utilizing synthetic intelligence manufactured by or on behalf of the Firm” — although the corporate’s autos don’t rely.

The administrators appear to agree that Optimus has “the potential to be Tesla’s bestselling product,” and so they say it reperesents “the clearest instance of how Tesla has the power to make autonomy profit all of humanity.”

However the board additionally notes that “commercialization plans” for Optimus are “nonetheless in improvement,” and Musk now has till 2035 to succeed in the a million mark.

Every part else

The fourth and remaining product aim Musk has to attain is to notch 10 million lively subscriptions to Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) software program. It’s arguably essentially the most bold product aim. The corporate doesn’t say what number of present homeowners have paid for FSD, although executives have just lately stated the adoption rate is within the “teenagers.” At greatest, meaning anyplace from a couple of hundred thousand to the low hundreds of thousands of Tesla autos have the software program put in.

Every part else Tesla’s board is asking of Musk is tied to cash. Finally, Musk wants to assist Tesla attain an $8.5 trillion valuation as a way to unlock the total worth of the compensation package deal and develop into a trillionaire himself.

Musk already had grand designs to perform one thing comparable. He has typically claimed that Tesla might in the future develop into extra worthwhile than Apple and Saudi Aramco mixed. At their present valuations, these two firms are collectively value round $5.5 trillion. However earlier this 12 months, the CEO claimed Tesla might be value greater than the next five most-valuable companies combined — which on the time meant he was aiming nearer to the $15 trillion mark.

Together with the aim of blowing up Tesla’s valuation, Musk is being requested to extend the corporate’s earnings to, basically, $400 billion per 12 months — an unlimited determine in comparison with final 12 months’s earnings of round $17 billion.

Lastly, Tesla’s board has requested for 2 notable assurances from Musk as a way to unlock the total worth of the compensation package deal. One is that he should work with the corporate to develop a plan for the way he shall be succeeded as CEO of Tesla (and the plan basically locks him to the corporate for a minimum of 7.5 years).

The opposite, buried in a footnote, is that Tesla acquired “assurances that Musk’s involvement with the political sphere would wind down in a well timed method.”

Taken as an entire, it’s a fancy settlement with plenty of actually pie-in-the-sky concepts about the place Tesla might go underneath Musk’s management over the following decade. The identical was stated in regards to the earlier compensation deal that Tesla struck with Musk back in 2018, and but the corporate hit all of these seemingly-outrageous objectives. (Musk’s award was finally dusted by Delaware’s Chancery Court.)

Nonetheless, it’s onerous to not discover simply how a lot these new objectives seem to return from the corporate attempting to tug its CEO’s guarantees again right down to Earth.