Threatening to leave Tesla if he doesn’t get more shares: Elon Musk.Image: keystone
Tesla is facing a fateful shareholder vote. Elon Musk threatens to leave if he doesn’t get his way.
Nov 6, 2025, 5:48 amNov 6, 2025, 5:48 am
The shareholders of the electric car manufacturer will decide at the general meeting on Thursday (from 10 p.m. CET) whether company boss Elon Musk has the prospect of a huge new share package.
Acceptance of the plan is not guaranteed: among others, two influential consulting firms that make recommendations for shareholders spoke out against it. Musk threatened to resign as CEO of Tesla if the compensation plan is not approved.
The package could be worth around a trillion US dollars – at least if the car manufacturer is worth $8.5 trillion on the stock market in ten years. That would be almost six times as much as now. With such an increase in value, the value of the shares he already owns would also break the trillion mark.
Other requirements for receiving the shares include that Musk remains in the executive suite for the decade – and Tesla has a million robotaxis in use and delivers a million AI robots.
Target 20 million Teslas sold
In total, Musk could get up to 423.74 million Tesla shares – in twelve stages, which are usually linked to increments of $500 billion in market value. In addition, there are the business goals such as the delivery of 20 million Teslas with a market value of two trillion dollars. An even bigger hurdle could be to later break the $400 billion mark in adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization in addition to the $6.5 trillion market value and stay above it.
Chairman of the Board of Directors Robyn Denholm emphasizes that Musk will come away empty-handed if Tesla does not achieve its goals. Musk himself says that what interests him more than the money is increasing his Tesla stake to 25 percent and thereby securing his influence in the company.
Focus on robots and robotaxis
Tesla, the electric car pioneer that caused the industry to undertake an expensive race to catch up a few years ago, appears disenchanted and is heading for its second year of declining sales. However, Musk argues that Tesla’s future lies in self-driving robotaxis and humanoid robots.
The tech billionaire also believes that the company’s “Optimus” robots have the potential to become the “greatest product of all time”. Version 3, planned for next year, will move so smoothly that it will appear “like a human in a robot costume,” Musk recently said. Self-driving cars and robots would bring about a “world without poverty” in which everyone has access to the best medical care. Because: “Optimus will be an incredible surgeon,” announced Musk. He hopes to start production of the robots by the end of next year.
Control over robot army
Musk directly links his demand for a 25 percent stake with control over the new technology. “If we build this robot army – will I at least have a strong influence on this robot army?” he said a few days ago. Otherwise he wouldn’t be comfortable with the idea.
If Musk’s primary concern is corporate influence rather than money, couldn’t Tesla have simply given him some shares with additional voting rights? At tech heavyweights like Google and the Facebook group Meta, a system with different types of shares has ensured control by the founders for years. Denholm told the business broadcaster CNBC that this would only happen before an IPO.
Norwegians vote against
Among those voting against the package is the Norwegian oil fund, the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world. The fund announced two days before the meeting that it appreciated the significant added value that Musk had created with his visionary role. At the same time, however, the Norwegians expressed concerns about, among other things, the unprecedented level of the proposed compensation.
This is not the first controversy surrounding Musk’s compensation. With a share package promised to him in 2018, Tesla met all of the targets set at the time. But a court in the state of Delaware, where Tesla was formally based at the time, found that Musk had too much influence on the board of directors when the plan was agreed and that shareholders were not sufficiently informed about it. The appeal process is still ongoing. (sda/dpa)