Tesla has proposed a massive new $1 trillion compensation package for its CEO Elon Musk, and many of the benchmarks he needs to hit are simply watered-down versions of promises he\u2019s spent years making about the company.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s not the picture Tesla\u2019s board of directors paints in the company\u2019s annual proxy statement<\/a>, where they revealed the proposed pay package. Instead, the board focuses on how it plans to create \u201cthe most valuable company in history.\u201d <\/p>\n To be sure, if Tesla accomplishes all that it aims for with this deal, it will look like a much different company at the end of the 10-year period it covers. That doesn\u2019t change the fact that the milestones the company is asking Musk to aim for are less ambitious than his own previously-stated goals.<\/p>\n While the unprecedented pay package still needs to be approved by shareholders at a meeting in November, it\u2019s easy to see the company\u2019s fervent fan base voting \u201cyes.\u201d Previous votes on Musk\u2019s compensation have been overwhelmingly approved by Tesla\u2019s shareholders. <\/p>\n With that in mind, let\u2019s take a look at what Musk needs to accomplish in order to receive the full payout. <\/p>\n Musk spent<\/a> years<\/a> claiming Tesla would be able to make 20 million electric vehicles per year<\/em> by 2030. This was back when he and his company were still promising to grow at a rate of 50% each year. <\/p>\n But Tesla walked away from those promises as sales growth stalled, and then reversed in 2024<\/a>. The company then pulled the 20-million-per-year goal from its impact report last year<\/a>, and stopped building a planned factory in Mexico that would have increased production<\/a>.<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco<\/span> Now, the first \u201cproduct goal\u201d that Tesla\u2019s board of directors laid out for Musk to achieve on his path to becoming a trillionaire is to deliver 20 million vehicles total<\/em>. Tesla has already sold eight million cars to date, and even with sales slumping, is moving just shy of 2 million per year. <\/p>\n With the new pay package being laid out over a 10-year period, that means the target has gone from 20 million EVs per year by 2030 to just 20 million total by 2035.<\/p>\n One of Musk\u2019s most infamous and outrageous promises about Tesla came in 2019, when he claimed that the company would have one million robotaxis on the road in 2020<\/a>. It\u2019s now 2025, and Tesla has only just begun to trial a robotaxi service in Austin, Texas that has, at most, around 20 or 30 cars with safety drivers on board<\/a>. <\/p>\n To access his full proposed pay package, Tesla is asking Musk to help the company realize an altered version of that promise, as another product goal listed is to have \u201c1 million Robotaxis in Commercial Operation.\u201d <\/p>\n It\u2019s a goal with caveats. The fine print shows that Tesla is only requiring there to be a \u201cdaily average aggregate\u201d of one million robotaxis \u201ccommercially operated by or on behalf of [Tesla] over a consecutive three-month period, as part of a transportation service.\u201d <\/p>\n Tesla goes on to define \u201cRobotaxi\u201d as any Tesla vehicle, including but not limited to the purpose-built \u201cCybercab\u201d it\u2019s developing, that is using the company\u2019s Full Self-Driving software to offer rides to people. <\/p>\n This includes customer-owned vehicles, which is another thing Musk has long promised but never delivered. He\u2019s spent years claiming that Tesla could flip a digital switch and turn existing vehicles into fully-autonomous ones, and that owners could add and subtract those vehicles to a larger robotaxi fleet at will. <\/p>\n But Musk has since said many of the Teslas currently on the road don\u2019t have the necessary hardware<\/a> for the former to happen, and the company has yet to demonstrate the latter. Regardless, Musk now has an even looser timeline to try and make both things happen.<\/p>\n Musk sees Tesla\u2019s future being all about the humanoid robot that it\u2019s developing, called Optimus. Just this week he claimed it could make up as much as 80% of the company\u2019s future revenue. <\/p>\n As he became increasingly focused on Optimus, Musk made some pretty wild promises about what that future would look like. One of his core claims was that Tesla will be making one million Optimus bots per year<\/em> by as early as 2029<\/a>. <\/p>\n And yet, Tesla\u2019s board is only asking Musk to deliver one million \u201cbots\u201d total as part of this proposed compensation plan. Tesla also defines \u201cbots\u201d as \u201cany robot or other physical product with mobility using artificial intelligence manufactured by or on behalf of the Company\u201d \u2014 though the company\u2019s vehicles do not count. <\/p>\n The directors seem to agree that Optimus has \u201cthe potential to be Tesla\u2019s bestselling product,\u201d and they say it reperesents \u201cthe clearest example of how Tesla has the ability to make autonomy benefit all of humanity.\u201d <\/p>\n But the board also notes that \u201ccommercialization plans\u201d for Optimus are \u201cstill in development,\u201d and Musk now has until 2035 to reach the one million mark.<\/p>\n The fourth and final product goal Musk has to achieve is to notch 10 million active subscriptions to Tesla\u2019s Full Self-Driving (FSD) software. It\u2019s arguably the most ambitious product goal. The company does not say how many current owners have paid for FSD, though executives have recently said the adoption rate<\/a> is in the \u201cteens.\u201d At best, that means anywhere from a few hundred thousand to the low millions of Tesla vehicles have the software installed.<\/p>\n Everything else Tesla\u2019s board is asking of Musk is tied to money. Ultimately, Musk needs to help Tesla reach an $8.5 trillion valuation in order to unlock the full value of the compensation package and become a trillionaire himself. <\/p>\n Musk already had grand designs to accomplish something similar. He has often claimed that Tesla could one day become more valuable than Apple and Saudi Aramco combined. At their current valuations, those two companies are collectively worth around $5.5 trillion. But earlier this year, the CEO claimed Tesla could be worth more than the next five most-valuable companies combined<\/a> \u2014 which at the time meant he was aiming closer to the $15 trillion mark.<\/p>\n Along with the goal of blowing up Tesla\u2019s valuation, Musk is being asked to increase the company\u2019s earnings to, essentially, $400 billion per year \u2014 an enormous figure compared to last year\u2019s earnings of around $17 billion. <\/p>\n Lastly, Tesla\u2019s board has asked for two notable assurances from Musk in order to unlock the full value of the compensation package. One is that he must work with the company to develop a plan for how he will be succeeded as CEO of Tesla (and the plan essentially locks him to the company for at least 7.5 years). <\/p>\n The other, buried in a footnote, is that Tesla received \u201cassurances that Musk\u2019s involvement with the political sphere would wind down in a timely manner.\u201d <\/p>\n Taken as a whole, it\u2019s a complex agreement with lots of truly pie-in-the-sky ideas about where Tesla could go under Musk\u2019s leadership over the next decade. The same was said about the previous compensation deal that Tesla struck with Musk back in 2018<\/a>, and yet the company hit all of those seemingly-outrageous goals. (Musk\u2019s award was ultimately dusted by Delaware\u2019s Chancery Court<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Still, it\u2019s hard not to notice just how much these new goals appear to come from the company trying to drag its CEO\u2019s promises back down to Earth.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/tesla-california-getty.jpg?w=680\" "\\"\\"")
20 million cars \u2026 total<\/h2>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 27-29, 2025<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/GettyImages-2183782412.jpg?w=680\" "\\"\\"")
One million robotaxis*<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/Bot_83.jpg?w=680\" "\\"\\"")
One million \u201cbots\u201d?<\/h2>\n
![\"Tesla's](\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/tesla-india-store-02.jpg?w=680\" "\\"\\"")
Everything else<\/h2>\n