Key Tesla Investor Says It Will Be Voting Against Making Elon Musk a Trillionaire

Elon Musk is hoping to make himself the world’s first trillionaire with an obscene Tesla pay package that would—over the course of several years—make him exponentially richer, despite the fact that he’s already the richest person on the planet.

However, for Musk to get the money, Tesla’s investors will have to approve it at the company’s annual shareholder meeting on November 6th in Giga, Texas. At least one prominent investor has made it known that they plan to vote against Musk’s ridiculous pay package. That investor is CalPERS, California’s pension system, which made it known this week that it thought giving a trillion dollars to Musk—a guy who says he wants to go to Mars and who, not too long, got on a stage and waved a chainsaw around—was probably a bad idea.

On Thursday, a CalPERS spokesperson told Bloomberg that the organization did not support the absurdly large payout for Musk. “The CEO pay package proposed by Tesla is larger than pay packages for CEOs in comparable companies by many orders of magnitude. It would also further concentrate power in a single shareholder,” the spokesperson told the outlet in a statement.

It’s worth noting that this isn’t the first time CalPERS has voted against a Musk pay package. Last year, the pension voted against Musk’s $46 billion pay package—what was considered by many, at the time, to be completely and totally obscene. “This exorbitant compensation package is at odds with CalPERS’ longstanding views on executive pay,” said CalPERS CEO Marcie Frost, at the time. “The compensation is excessive when compared to executives at peer companies, highly dilutive to shareholders, and isn’t tied to the long-term profitability of Tesla.” That pay package, which was originally approved in 2018 but has been held up by legal challenges since then, was ultimately re-approved by shareholders last year, but a Delaware judge has also rejected that decision. Musk is currently appealing the decision.

At this point, Musk’s overall chances of getting the new gigantic pay package are unclear. Reuters notes that Tesla’s board has been pushing for investors to vote for it, with Chair Robyn Denholm warning them that “Musk could leave if the deal is rejected.” (At this point, given that it’s widely believed that Musk is one of the single biggest reasons that Tesla’s global sales are cratering, maybe that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world for the company?) Other pension leaders and unions have criticized the pay package and, on Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that Tesla was looking at internal candidates to replace Musk, should the pay package not go through and he decide to bail on them. Gizmodo reached out to CalPERS and Tesla for comment.

The pay package battles are funny for how completely and totally unnecessary they are. Elon is already the richest person in the world—in fact, he’s one of the richest people in the history of the world. So why does he need so much more? Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple (arguably a much more important company than Tesla), only took home a measly $76 million last year. Why can’t Elon just settle for a similar pay package—you know, something in the neighborhood of $100 million? In the current environment of oligarchic ascendance, nobody would bat an eyelash at that sort of thing. Instead, he insists on comically gargantuan amounts of money. The kind of gargantuan sum that could buy elections for generations to come.

That said, financial perspective has never been Elon’s strong suit. This is a guy who spent almost $300 million during the 2024 presidential campaign, only to flame out with the administration after six months and accuse Donald Trump of being in the Jeffrey Epstein files. I guess when you have too much money it’s easy to lose sight of what a dollar is really worth—or how much you really need.