The Hurdles Elon Musk Must Clear to Unlock $1T in Tesla Pay (www.wsj.com)

Tesla is asking shareholders to approve a record-setting, 12‑tranche pay plan that could award Elon Musk roughly $1 trillion in new stock and boost his stake to about 25% if extreme financial and operational milestones are met. Shareholders vote Thursday. The package ties payouts to a mix of corporate and AI/robotics targets, including $2 trillion market cap, $50 billion EBITDA, 20 million cars delivered, 10 million Full Self‑Driving (FSD) subscriptions, 1 million robotaxis in operation, and 1 million robots sold—Musk must clear the market‑cap threshold plus at least one of the operational metrics for the first tranche. For the AI/ML community this is significant because it explicitly monetizes large‑scale deployment of autonomous driving and humanoid robots (Optimus), effectively incentivizing Tesla to pursue mass fleet operations and subscription monetization. Hitting targets like 10M FSD subscribers or 1M robotaxis would require order‑of‑magnitude advances in perception, planning, safety validation, simulation fidelity, fleet learning, edge compute, and regulatory approvals. The plan raises questions about product safety versus growth incentives, shareholder dilution and governance, and could accelerate investment and competition in autonomy, simulation platforms, data infrastructure and AI chips—while also increasing regulatory and legal scrutiny as Tesla pushes toward real‑world scale.