Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, recently made headlines with a staggering $1 trillion compensation package, one of the largest in corporate history. While the figure grabs attention, many analysts and critics argue that the package is largely symbolic, built on ambitious targets that Musk has struggled to meet in the past.
The package is primarily composed of stock options tied to Tesla’s performance milestones, including market capitalization, revenue growth, and operational achievements. Musk can only realize the full value if Tesla meets these extremely ambitious benchmarks over a set period. Many of these targets are considered optimistic, given the company’s previous challenges in production, delivery, and scaling operations. This has led critics to question whether the $1T figure is realistic or simply a headline-grabbing number.
One Million robotaxis
In 2019, one of Musk’s most globally-known and ridiculous promises about Tesla, was that the company would have a million robotaxis on the road by 2020. It’s now 2025, and Tesla has only recently begun to test a robotaxi service in Austin, Texas with at most 20 or 30 cars and safety drivers in them.
Tesla requires Musk to aid the company in achieving an alternate version of that promise to access his full pay package, as one of the products objectives is to have “1 million Robotaxis in Commercial Operation.”
20 million cars … total
Musk has been making the claim for years now that Tesla would be able to manufacture 20 million EVs per year by the year 2030. This was back when he and even more so his company were promising to grow at a rate of 50% a year.
But Tesla walked back on those promises, and sales were so flat they began to reverse in 2024. Then the company pulled the 20 m p/y goal from its impact report last year, and retracted a plan to build a factory in Mexico that was going to manufacture millions of vehicles.
Now, the first “product goal” that Tesla’s board of direcors made for Musk to achieve in his quest to reach realized trillonare status is to deliver a total of 20 million vehicles. Tesla had sold 8 million cars to date, and have been moving just shy of 2m a year with slumping sales.
With the new pay package proposed to be over 10 years, this mean the goal has changed from 20 million EVs per year by 2030, to just 20 million total by the year 2035.
1 Million Bots?
Musk has indicated that Tesla’s future is all about the humanoid robot it’s developing, which is called Optimus. Just this week Musk said it could make up as much as 80% of the company’s future revenue.
As Musk became more and more fixated on Optimus, he offered some pretty audacious proclamations about what that future might look like. One of his key claims is that Tesla will produce one million Optimus bots a year by as early as 2029.
So while Tesla’s board is asking Musk to deliver one million “bots” in total as part of this proposed compensation plan. In addition, Tesla defined the term “bots” as “any robot or any other mobile physical product that utilizes artificial intelligence, and is manufactured by or on behalf of the Company,” and importantly, Tesla vehicles do not count.
The directors seem to agree that Optimus has “the potential to be Tesla’s best-selling product,” and say it demonstrates “the clearest example of how autonomous technology can benefit all of humanity.”
The board also emphasizes that Optimal’s “commercialization plans” “are in development,” and as it stands, Musk has until 2035 in order to reach one million.
