It's official: Tesla put a ring on it. The company's shareholders awarded CEO Elon Musk a $46 billion stock grant, something Musk had demanded in order to not leave Tesla at the altar.
Now, $46 billion is a very large amount to give anyone, let alone the guy who has tanked the stock so much that the award itself lost $10 billion since January (which was when a judge blocked the unusual payout from a board that included Musk family members).
Luckily, Tesla has provided an easy way to visualize it. The company just handed Elon Musk a million bucks for every one of the 46,561 new and unsold Teslas that appeared in the company's inventory in the first quarter of 2024 — a record pile-up for the company, which now has so many parking lots full of unsold Teslas that you can see them from space.
The stock award is also the equivalent of $12 million for every Cybertruck sold from that vehicle's launch through April, and exactly the same number for every Cybertruck that had to be recalled when a pad on its accelerator pedal started flying off. And it's $153 million for every Cybertruck owner currently trying to unload his metal elephant online (roughly 5 percent of all Cybertrucks in existence are on the second-hand market right now).
Was there any acknowledgment of setbacks on the Cybertruck, which Musk has repeatedly said will dig a grave for Tesla if there aren't enough sold, at the Tesla shareholder meeting? There was not. The closest Musk came to acknowledging the national joke that Cybertruck has become, was this weird defensive remark: "if you want to know whether Cybertrucks are cool or not, ask a kid. Kids have no filter, right?"
That was genuinely Musk's argument: because kids might gawp over the car that looks like it was designed by a 12-year-old, so should the grown adults who, y'know, actually buy cars. Good use of $46 billion, Tesla shareholders!
Also, great job on reinforcing the notion that Tesla is unfriendly to the Democratic voters who comprise the majority of Tesla's customer base. Giving $46 billion to the guy who is restoring and promoting literal Nazis on Twitter while silencing dissent sounds like about as good an idea to that customer base as reinstalling Musk's brother and Rupert Murdoch's son on the board. (Which Tesla also just did.)
But no word of dissent could be heard inside the Tesla bubble of the shareholder meeting, which resembled nothing so much as a cult. Musk mumbled his way through unplanned remarks, his silences more and more concerning to a neutral listener, only to receive whoops for any sentence he completed. In the Q&A, the first questioner simply praised Musk for everything he'd done "for the First Amendment." Presumably he didn't mean the repeated censorship and the banning of journalists.
Like any good cult leader, Musk was playing to his audience. Rather than return to the vague promises of a $25,000 Tesla EV that enthused analysts on the last earnings call, Musk simply went through the list of every current Tesla product, then explained how its revenue could skyrocket, then repeated that it wouldn't be easy to get there. The robot Optimus, we were reliably assured, could be a $1 trillion business.
There was no explaining how Musk got his numbers. But there was one number he was unimpeachably accurate about.
"It's 4:20pm. I just noticed that," Musk giggled, then stretched out an uncomfortable silence. "So, uh. Yeah. Yeah."
Congratulations, Tesla shareholders. I hope you and this very mature, very clever adult will be very happy together.
