Musk Hijacks Tesla Earnings Call to Vouch for $1 Trillion Pay Plan

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00:00That's classic Elon. It is. I mean, there's probably no figure in modern life who so openly

00:06flirts with the idea of his own insanity as Elon Musk. And but of course, what he's talking about

00:11on an earnings call. Yeah, on an earnings call. Of course, what he's saying essentially is you

00:17got to let me cook. And and the only reason I should be fired is if I am going, you know,

00:23going crazy. And that would be crazier than he normally is, because, of course, he's he's pretty

00:28out there on a normal day. And for for believers, that's that's kind of part of the appeal.

00:33Dare I say, Max, a lot of people would say, even though they would could be critical of

00:37a trillion dollar pay package, they say, well, what would Tesla be without Elon Musk?

00:42Yeah. And that's kind of the difficult position that investors find themselves in this company

00:46where, yeah, there there's some opposition to this pay package. And we've seen some of the

00:50shareholder advisory firms come out against it. But I think for most investors, you're kind of

00:56in a position where if you put if you say no to this package and Elon Musk threatens to leave or

01:03even does leave the stock falls. Right. It doesn't it doesn't go up because so much of this company's

01:08value is about the future. And that future is all about Elon Musk. The other thing I'll say about this

01:13pay package, big as it is, it's mostly it's requiring the company to get even bigger, to to to hit

01:21milestones that that seem almost cartoonish at this point. So if you're an investor, you're saying,

01:26well, I mean, you know, let's hope it works out. He's he's he's been effective before.

01:32Why not this time? Well, I got to say one investor we're talking about New York State and the

01:35comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli, did say that Tesla pay package for Elon is overly generous, lacks clear

01:41performance metrics to justify the one trillion dollars that he could earn under this proposal.

01:47He plans to vote against the compensation package and Tesla directors up for reelection on November

01:526th. He spoke with Bloomberg Surveillance on TV earlier today. When you see the excessive

01:57compensation package, I mean, you know, credit to Mr. Musk, he's already one of the richest men in

02:03the world. How much more rich does one person have to be? I don't know. I'm not that rich, but so

02:10I don't know. I don't know. I know that we joke about that, but I don't know if that's the right

02:14question to be asking, Max. Is it about wealth or is it about control? I think it's about both.

02:20I mean, you know, people always say and you always hear things like, well, Elon Musk doesn't care.

02:25He's so rich. He is hundreds of worth hundreds of billion dollars. What's another couple hundred

02:29billion dollars? But I think I think when you're talking about this level of wealth, you do like

02:33the amount of money he stands to make on this package would, you know, double his wealth

02:37potentially. So like that that is a big difference. And the other thing, Tim, as you said,

02:41Musk says this is about control. It's about being able to maintain his position to essentially be

02:48able to operate without any kind of shareholder activism, a critic might say, without constraint.

02:56You know, having said that, you go to the core business, right? And EV is like, listen, for a long

03:01time, he and Tesla did not really face much competition here in the U.S. And he and Tesla for

03:06a long time, promise, promise, promise, didn't deliver. And then they started to deliver. But the

03:10environment is changing. But so, too, is the evolution continuing for Tesla as a company,

03:17right? Whether it's battery storage and other businesses. But I don't know what is the business

03:21and does that business, would it be able to hit some of these metrics to justify this pay package?

03:28I mean, that is what's so difficult. And to the point that Thomas Napoli is making in there,

03:33you know, Tesla has not done that great over the last couple of years. The stock price has been

03:39has been phenomenal investors and particularly like the kind of retail investors who follow what

03:46Elon Musk says and buy his stock like they they are in love with this thing. There is a boom in AI.

03:52Elon Musk is talking a lot about AI. But, you know, car sales have not been great. And even in this

03:57quarter, which was good, right, where sales went way up, margins went down. And there is a sense among

04:03investors. And you've even heard this from the company itself that this is going to be a bit of an

04:06operation because what happened is the tax credit, the seventy five hundred bucks is effectively making

04:11electric cars cheaper. It went away as part of the big, beautiful bill that, you know, that Trump

04:17passed. So so this is kind of like a one time thing where you have a bunch of people basically moving

04:22purchases forward at the same time. Lots of competition from lots of automakers. Now, we talked

04:28about this really for years, for almost a decade, like, you know, GM and others are going to come.

04:33Well, they're here now. There are a bunch of really great electric cars that cost the same

04:38amount of money or in some markets less than a Tesla. You know, BYD has cars in Europe that are

04:44very, very competitive with Tesla and are cheaper. GM has cars now that are about the same price as the

04:50cheapest car and that are competitive. So so that's a challenge. And then on the other hand, you have

04:54Musk's kind of fantastic promises around humanoid robots, around autonomy. And that stuff is hard to

05:01value. You basically either value that at zero or you value it at like 20 trillion dollars. And so

05:07so it's kind of created a gap in the discourse around this company.

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