Elon Musk gets his trillion dollar pay package

How do you become the world’s first trillionaire? If you thought it’s by working hard, saving every penny and making your own lattes instead of buying them at Starbucks, we have news that may disappoint you.

On Thursday, during the company’s Annual Shareholder Meeting, Tesla shareholders have voted to approve CEO Elon Musk’s ridiculously hefty pay package that could net him $1 trillion dollars worth of Tesla shares. That, on top of the roughly $473 billion he already owns, would make him by far the wealthiest person on Earth and the world’s first trillionaire.

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Musk already is the wealthiest person in the world, but he’s got Oracle’s Larry Ellison breathing down his neck with a $303 billion net worth.

Getting that trillion won’t be easy. According to the terms of the 2025 CEO Performance Award, as the agreement is innocently called, Musk will have to stay at Tesla for seven and a half years, and bring the company’s market share to $8.5 trillion in order to earn the full award, as well as hit a number of other goals such as deliver 20 million Tesla vehicles, 1 million “bots,” and have 1 million Robotaxis in commercial operation.

For comparison, the largest company by market cap is currently Nvidia with a “mere” $4.6 trillion capitalization, followed by Apple with $4 billion. Yes, Tesla would have to be roughly the market cap of both Apple and Nvidia combined for Musk to achieve this goal.

This sounds very much in tune with Musk’s typical lofty promises which often get revised or extended far into the future, but at least now there’s a fixed agreement on when all of this must happen: by Nov. 6, 2035.

Notably, during the shareholders meeting, Musk said the new Tesla Roadster’s unveiling is scheduled for April 1, 2026 — literally days after he’d said he hopes the unveiling would happen “before the end of the year.” Good luck with that trillion.