[simonh]

I'll make you a deal. You agree to give me a trillion dollars, but only if I make you 8 trillion dollars.

I don't think he'll deliver and I think it's based on fantasy economics, he's been really losing it recently, but as a deal it's not entirely irrational if he could make it happen.

[wat10000]

The thing is, the compensation is only based on it happening, not on him making it happen. “I make you 8 trillion dollars” rests on a strong assumption that it all comes from the CEO.

This particular CEO is on the more influential end of the spectrum, but I think executives generally get too much credit for outcomes. If this does happen, it won’t just be because of the CEO, but also because of ~100,000 other employees. Their contribution might be smaller, but comparing compensation, I don’t think it’s proportionally smaller.

[simonh]

Speaking honestly as a foot soldier employee, I look around myself and I think you could swap out most of the people around me, including me, for most other people in our industry and the company would continue just fine. In fact that happens naturally over time anyway. The work we do is essential, but as individuals we are not essential. If I quit and move on, how many investors will reconsider their position in my company? Give me a break, and they would be right to not care.

It's about leverage. It's all about where you stand and how long your lever is. Musk stands at the top and he has a very long set of levers. He's also much more closely personally involved in engineering aspects of a company that most CEOs know little to nothing about. Sometimes that's good, sometimes it's bad, because his decisions have massively outsized effects because of this. Leverage.

If Musk makes good or bad decisions over the next few years, that matters much, much more than the decisions of anyone else at Tesla, especially because he hires and fires everyone else at Tesla. They're all only there, as individuals in particular, because of him anyway.

As it happens I think his decision making has deteriorated significantly recently, in some respects but not all. Also Tesla just doesn't have the magic special sauce SpaceX has had since they developed reusability. There's no special engineering insight in the Tesla architecture. Other vehicle manufacturers already caught up. That catch up is happening in space tech as well with BO's recent booster recovery, but SpaceX still has a very significant lead there, based on a truly revolutionary concept (which Musk championed personally) that they had exclusively for 10 years. Starship still doesn't work though, so we'll see.

[wat10000]

I can't help but notice you said you could swap out most of the people around you, not all. Yeah, some random salesperson is not contributing enormously to the company's growth and could be replaced without much difficulty. But that's not true of everybody. The CEO is not uniquely special in this regard.

I agree that the CEO is typically the most important in this respect, especially this particular CEO. I just think that giving him an additional 1/8th of the company's entire market cap growth, on top of the roughly 1/8th he already has, is highly disproportionate.

Clearly the shareholders disagree, and that's entirely their right. And I'm not surprised, CEOs are greatly overvalued in general.