Elon Musk already guided Tesla through a period of “meteoric growth” to make it one of the world’s most valuable companies. Now, a new pay package is asking him to do it all over again, but on a scale that is exponentially larger and more difficult.
The proposed plan challenges Musk to take a company already worth over a trillion dollars and multiply its value by more than eight times to $8.5 trillion. This is a fundamentally different challenge from growing a smaller, niche company into a major player. It requires creating entirely new, multi-trillion-dollar markets in areas like AI and robotics.
The board is essentially betting that Musk’s skills are scalable to this new, mega-corporate level. The previous growth was about disrupting an existing industry (automotive). The future growth required by this plan is about creating entirely new ones from scratch.
This is the ultimate test of his “visionary leader” status. Was his first success a once-in-a-generation achievement, or does he possess a repeatable formula for creating historically valuable enterprises? The trillion-dollar reward is contingent on the answer being the latter.